Their Backs against the Sea: The Battle of Saipan and the Largest Banzai Attack of World War II Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Bill Sloan

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  First Da Capo Press edition 2017

  ISBN 978-0-306-82471-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-306-82472-2 (ebook)

  Published by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  www.dacapopress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this book.

  Editorial production by Christine Marra, Marrathon Production Services.

  www.marrathoneditorial.org

  DESIGN BY JANE RAESE

  Set in 13-point Adobe Jensen

  LSC-C

  E3-20170504-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1 Islands of Mystery

  2 The Infernal Beach

  3 The Eternal Beach

  4 Enter the 27th Division

  5 The Marianas Turkey Shoot

  6 Smith vs. Smith

  7 “Something’s Coming!”

  8 To Die with Honor

  9 The Aftermath

  10 Tinian’s Rolling Plains

  11 Coming Home

  12 Tinian and the B-29

  13 Dismay in Japan

  Epilogue

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Index

  TO MY LATE, DEAR FRIEND, FLOYD WOOD,

  who suggested Wake Island as the subject of my first military history.

  That was fourteen years and five books ago. Thanks, Floyd.

  Prologue

  ONE DAY in early June 1944 the heavily laden troop transports lifted anchor and began moving slowly out of Pearl Harbor. Sergeant Tom Tinsley watched as they slipped past the submarine nets toward a destination that only God—and a few high brass—knew.

  Somewhere on an obscure island that nobody even knew the name of yet, Tinsley and the rest of the 8th Marines, 2nd Marine Division, were among tens of thousands of young men—many of them still in their teens—sailing into hostile, unknown waters for the first time that day.

  He wasn’t sure why the thought of past Christmases suddenly crossed his mind, but it did. He thought of his mother and father and his younger sister, Helen, getting up at the crack of dawn to open their presents. He remembered the Christmas when he got the baseball glove. And the year he got the roller skates—that was a surprise. It almost made up for the time when he got a set of Tinkertoys that he had to share with Helen.

  The thoughts of Christmastime brought to mind an old-salt Marine named Russell McCurdy, whom Tinsley had gotten to know. McCurdy had been aboard the battleship USS Arizona when she was torpedoed and sunk on 7 December 1941. He was one of the lucky ones—he got off alive, while hundreds of his fellow crewmen died.

  The recollection of Christmases past caused Tinsley to think of food. Chow lines were long, and eating was almost a continuous process on board the ship. But eating, as far as he was concerned, was not nearly as important as finding a place where he could have some time to himself. He searched for a spot to just stretch out, read a book, or sit quietly and dream of home, back in the small town of Paris, Arkansas, not far from Pine Bluff. He found a place that wasn’t too crowded. The one he liked best was behind a 40-millimeter gun turret where there was always a cool breeze blowing across the bow.

  The hardest thing about being aboard the troop transport was what lay ahead. In spite of more than a year spent on guard duty at Pearl, he had never been in combat before, and he knew that shortly he would be storming ashore on some unknown beach on some unknown island. Sometimes he wondered whether he would end up dying alone there.

  Those thoughts would come creeping into his mind, and he tried hard not to dwell on them, but some of his friends did. Just a few days before, one buddy had been joking and kidding around, the life of the party. Now he wouldn’t talk at all, not even when Tinsley brought him something to eat. He’d just sit there and stare at the deck. Tinsley tried to ignore him by keeping busy, reading, playing cards, and cleaning his weapon.

  Now it was the early morning of 15 June 1944, and the ship had stopped. For Tinsley, everything seemed to have stopped. Conversation among the men was in a low tone, almost a whisper.

  Men standing in line could see a dark, almost shapeless form far across the water. It danced before their eyes in a reflection of bright explosions a few miles away—the artillery bombardment had already begun. Most of the men had never heard of Saipan until a few short days ago, but that was their destination. It was going to be a tough row to hoe, everyone said.

  Although many guys didn’t sleep well the night before, they climbed aboard their landing crafts (known officially as LVTs, for landing vehicle, tracked, and unofficially as Amtracks, for amphibious tractors) and headed for shore. Most of the 2nd and 4th Marines had been up and reasonably alert by 0200 that morning, and soon after, they sat down to the kind of breakfast that, under normal circumstances, would’ve been fit for a king—sizzling steaks, eggs, bacon, ham, fresh milk, and an endless supply of juice and coffee. Tinsley ate his fill. This was a sure sign that this was it.

  At the stroke of 0700 all hell broke loose. Navy and Marine planes started bombing runs. Battleships opened fire with their sixteen-inch guns. Cruisers and destroyers kicked in with their five-inch and 40-millimeter weapons. If a ship had a gun, it was firing at the beach. Tinsley couldn’t see how anyone could possibly live through that kind of bombardment.

  It wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, however. As the Amtracks moved forward and approached the beach, Japanese shells started hitting the water and exploding. It had all sounded so easy on paper: the 6th Marines would take Beaches Red 2 and Red 3, the 8th Marines would take Beaches Green 1 and Green 2, the 23rd Marine regiment would land on beaches designated as Blue 1 and Blue 2, and so on…

  The Amtrack Tinsley was in got about a hundred yards from the beach, then it high-centered on a large part of the wide coral reef that lined the shoreline and started spinning around and around like a windmill. It whirled crazily but refused to move forward.

  To Tinsley’s right, another Amtrack was suddenly struck in the middle by Japanese artillery. At first it was there—then it wasn’t.

  Tinsley’s captain gave the order to abandon ship. The front ramp was dropped, and most of the men made a run for the front of the Amtrack and jumped into the water, which was somewhere between their neck and shoulders deep, until everyone but Tinsley and three other Marines were left.

  Two men froze in their seats and refused to move. They were Sergeant Major Solace and Private First Class Berberick, guys Tinsley knew well—or thought he knew—and no one could drag them out of the Amtrack. Meanwhile the Japanese artillery had the Amtrack bracketed. The next shot they fired was almost certain to be a direct hit.

  “There’s nothing more we can do,” the captain said. “We better get the hell out before
we get killed.”

  The captain and Tinsley jumped into the water and were about halfway to the beach when the Amtrack was hit and exploded into a million pieces, killing Solace and Berberick instantly.

  Tinsley hit the beach running and threw himself into a slight incline behind an embankment landing beside another Marine. He yelled a half-dozen words to him before he realized the man was dead.

  Tinsley had lost sight of the captain, and he had no desire to hunker down with the dead Marine, so he got up and ran. Dozens of Marines—all of them dead—lay in his path.

  My God, he thought, is everyone here but me dead?

  chapter 1

  Islands of Mystery

  THE ISLAND of Saipan was approximately four miles wide and fourteen miles long, giving it the second largest landmass, after Guam, in the Marianas archipelago, a group of fifteen islands that runs in a shallow, curving line for 425 miles in the mid-Pacific. Traces of human settlement found by archeologists on Saipan covered approximately four thousand years. The islands were officially discovered in 1521 by Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan in the course of his first voyage around the world.

  Magellan was struck by the magnificent sailing power of the native boats and by the similarity of their rigging to those of the small sailing craft he had encountered in his own Mediterranean, and he labeled his discovery “Islas de las Velas Latinas” (Islands of the Lateen Sails). Some of his crewmen, however, preferred to call them the “Islands of Thieves” because of the larcenous habits of the natives, and the name remained popular well into the twentieth century.

  Late in the 1600s Maria Anna of Austria, wife of Philip IV and queen of Spain, dispatched a group of missionaries and soldiers to the islands, and the official name from that time on became the Marianas Islands.

  The Chamorros were the original native population of the Marianas, and as time wore on, they became agitated toward the rigid rule of the Catholic priesthood, and armed revolution broke out in the islands in the 1690s. Many of the Chamorros fled to other islands further north, where they were largely pursued and persecuted. When the US invasion of the island occurred on 15 June 1944, about 3,900 Chamorros were still living on Saipan and the neighboring island of Tinian. Many of them worked as slave laborers for the Japanese.

  Imperial Germany challenged Spanish control, which had become progressively weaker during the nineteenth century. This led to the eventual 1899 cessation of all Spanish possessions in the Caroline Islands, the Marshall Islands, and the Marianas. Germany paid Spain about $4 million to acquire the islands.

  In 1914, shortly after the beginning of World War I, Japan seized all but one of the islands in the chain. The League of Nations officially recognized the seizure, and in 1920 it mandated the rest of the Marianas—less Guam—to Japan with the stipulation that none of the islands would be fortified, a stipulation that Japan made a point of overlooking. Guam, the largest island in the Marianas, was owned by the United States and used as a vital coaling station and a small naval base.

  IN THE YEARS between the two World Wars Saipan became known as one of Japan’s “Islands of Mystery” because so little was known about what was taking place there. Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in 1935 and let it be known that she would not tolerate any challenge to her sovereignty in this part of the Pacific. She began to settle and develop the island vigorously, immigrating thousands of Japanese, Koreans, and other Asians in the process; they soon outnumbered the natives as they built sugar plantations, refineries, and other infrastructure. By 1943 approximately 33,000 civilians lived on Saipan, including the 3,900 Chamorros. The islands were very jealously guarded against visits by anyone from the West, mainly because Japan was hurrying to build a series of naval installations and airbases there. These included two airfields and a seaplane base at Saipan along with two airfields on the island of Tinian, located just three and a half nautical miles to the southwest.

  By the early 1940s the Japanese regular army was composed of seventeen divisions with 464,000 men. Every Japanese division was self-sustaining with its own artillery, cavalry, engineers, tanks, and quartermaster troops, and each division contained exactly 22,000 men.

  But that was only the beginning. In a crisis situation there were 738,000 members of the army reserve, all of whom had undergone the same rigorous training and could be activated at a moment’s notice. This meant that the Japanese army actually totaled more than 1.2 million men. The Japanese generals had vowed to create the finest army in the world, and there were strong indications that they had done exactly that.

  The typical Japanese soldier was tough and well trained to do whatever was necessary to win a battle. American reporter John Goette, who spent more than four years covering the exploits of the Japanese soldiers in China, including the killing of an estimated 200,000 civilians in the Rape of Nanking, observed, “There are no volunteers in the Japanese army, only conscripts… every Japanese male is a potential fighting unit who remains subject to call for the rest of his life. Bodily comfort, non-essential equipment, food, transport, promotion, rest and glory are purposely subordinated to achieve the high results of team play.”

  It was an exciting time when a Japanese boy was inducted into the army. As the train carrying the boy pulled away to conscript training, friends and family waved flags and shouted, “Banzai! Banzai!”—the traditional Japanese war cry that literally meant “[May you live] ten thousand years.” The flamboyant departure let the boy know that in his people’s eyes he was already considered a hero and a representative of the emperor and his country.

  EVEN AS THE Japanese were fortifying the island, Saipan was also being developed as a rich agricultural center, especially for sugar. Cane fields covered hundreds of acres in lower-lying areas of Saipan, and narrow-gauge railroads were built to carry the syrup to a long pier for loading directly onto Japanese cargo ships. The railroad almost completely encircled the island along the coast, save for a few places on the more rugged eastern side.

  Saipan’s major peacetime industry was sugar production, with the crops from large plantations and a giant sugar mill turning out huge quantities of alcohol for producing synthetic Scotch whisky, port wine, saki, and beer. These products would come in handy for Japanese troops in the days to come. Widespread usage of alcohol would become a common tool for motivating Japanese soldiers when World War II broke out.

  BECAUSE OF ITS strategic location in the Marianas, Saipan served as a major stepping stone connecting the Japanese Empire to its Pacific island fortresses. The Japanese understood the importance of the Marianas in defending their homeland and recognized that an American invasion could result in a struggle that would decide the war’s outcome.

  Saipan was located 1,260 miles from Tokyo. That put it out of reach from the newest US land-based bombers in the early 1940s, but when the United States developed the huge B-29 Superfortress in the mid-1940s, the entire context changed. Suddenly Tokyo and the rest of Japan would be within striking distance if US forces could secure Saipan.

  Saipan was the most heavily fortified island in the Marianas. If the United States could capture it, it would have secure airbases for its B-29s. Saipan’s Aslito Airfield, with a 3,600-foot runway located near the south end of the island, and another airfield, Marpi Point, under construction at the extreme north end of the island, made it even more attractive. The airfields on Tinian, slightly smaller and just three and a half miles south of Saipan, also had promise, but US forces were less familiar with them.

  American proponents such as Admiral Ernest J. King, commander-in-chief of the US Fleet, advocated for capturing the island to provide a base of operations from which protected lines of Japanese communication could be severed and from which long-range aircraft could be used to bomb Tokyo and the Japanese home islands. Not everyone shared Admiral King’s conviction, however. General Douglas MacArthur opposed invading the Marianas because it would be “time consuming and expensive”; he argued that an approach along the northern coast of N
ew Guinea “offered much better chances for success.”

  King held his ground against MacArthur and others, however, and Saipan was chosen.

  SAIPAN WOULD NOT be an easy target for an invasion at any time, but even more so in the month of June. Although the Japanese used it extensively as a rest area and training center, the island lacked the natural facilities of a major naval base. A treacherous coral barrier reef fringed much of the island, with a submerged arm curving out from the upper west coast to enclose Tanapag Harbor. Invading troops would be forced to go in over a reef seven hundred yards across in some places. Still, it was the only possible landing site, as steep hills characterized the other side of the island.

  Rainfall totaled about 125 inches per year, with an average of 275 rainy days annually—and June and July were far and away the wettest months. Although the temperature ordinarily hovered between 76 and 80 degrees, June was a bad month for heat waves. The high temperatures sometimes topped out at around 95 degrees.

  Almost in the center of Saipan the huge bulk of Mount Tapotchau humped its back against the sky, rising to a height of 1,554 feet, and its steep, almost perpendicular sides made it seem even higher. This mountain was a key terrain feature that gave the Japanese an excellent place to observe—and shell—the US beachhead.

  THE US PLAN of attack was straightforward. The lower western coast of Saipan was divided into eight landing beaches that stretched for six thousand yards. Each beach was code-named Red Beach 1, Red Beach 2, Red Beach 3, and so on for the remaining eight areas designated by Green, Blue, and Yellow. The 2nd Marine Division would land on the northern Red and Green beaches. The 4th Marine Division would land on the Blue and Yellow beaches. Landing sites on the eastern sides of the island had been weighed and ruled out because of a variety of problems, including the rough and rocky cliffs that would give the Americans a mass of trouble in the days to come.