Robert Leckie - Strong Men Armed

“Before you do anything else, Doc,” Crowe said, “cut off that hanging thumbnail.”

“Be quiet, Colonel,” the doctor hissed. “You’re a very sick man”.

“Sick man, hell!” Crowe croaked. “Cut off that thumbnail. It’s damned annoying.”

The doctor obliged, probably because he wished to humor a man who hadn’t much chance to live. But Crowe did live—and his battalion was re-formed by that soft-voiced Major William Chamberlin who was his very opposite. Chamberlin’s men wheeled to their right to strike south at Afetna Point, blasting away with shotguns issued especially for close-in fighting. They knocked out the antiboat gun and also reduced those batteries which covered the reef channel where the tanks had been held up.

But by nightfall Afetna Point had not fallen. It was a Japanese pocket almost in the center of the beachhead.

About 1,200 yards behind it, near Lake Susupe, the “armored pigs” were engaging enemy tanks for the first time.

Sergeants Ben Livesey and Onel Dickens had halted the amtanks they commanded on the crest of a little, tree-shaded hill. It was ten in the morning and the men were hungry. They jumped out, heated their cans of C-rations, opened them and began to eat.

They heard firing.

Below their hill three Japanese tanks were rolling toward a trio of Marine amtracks mired in the muck of Lake Susupe swamp. The Japanese were between the amtankers and the trapped Marines.

The amtankers jumped back into their armored pigs, buttoned down the turrets and went rocking down the hill and up the road on the Japanese tanks’ tail. The Japanese wheeled. One of them stalled.

The 75 in Dickens’ tank roared. Flame gushed from the stalled enemy. Then Livesey’s 75 spoke. The middle tank jumped and spun off the road. Side by side, Livesey and Dickens moved up on the remaining tank and shot its treads away. The amtank turrets popped open. The Marines jumped out with rifles in hand, and the surviving Japanese crewmen were put to death.

With the Marines they had rescued, Livesey and Dickens returned to their hillcrest. For the rest of the day, the Lake Susupe region was left alone.

Back on the beaches the accuracy of Japanese artillery fire was crowding medical aid stations with casualties. Never before had the Marines encountered such deadly artillery fire, and with about 8,000 men put ashore by nine o’clock in the morning, there was a plenitude of targets for the enemy gunners.

Within the Fourth Division’s zone, men dug foxholes to shelter the wounded. One man was brought in with his leg almost blown off between hip and knee. A battalion surgeon amputated it without bothering to remove him from his stretcher. Two more stretcher cases came in, one a private, the other an old-time sergeant. The private said he had to relieve himself. A corpsman seized the sergeant’s helmet and handed it to the private. It was the ultimate violation of authority and the sergeant watched in helpless fury, raging:

“That I should live to see the day when a private should do that in my helmet!”

They were taken, both violated and violator, out to the reef and there transferred to landing boats. From there they went to hospital transports already stuffed with wounded and preparing to pull up anchors and sail away. By nightfall the Second Division alone had 238 men killed and 1,022 wounded -and of 355 reported missing few would be found alive. The Fourth Division, though not so badly hit, had already exceeded its casualty rate for the Roi-Namur campaign.

But by nightfall there were something like 20,000 Marines ashore on Saipan. They held a beachhead about four miles wide from its northern down to its southern flank and a mile at its deepest inland or eastern penetration. Within the perimeter, which had both flanks bent back to the sea, were tanks and artillery, as well as Generals Watson and Schmidt, both of whom came ashore in the afternoon.

However, neither division had reached its first day’s objective. The Afetna Point pocket still stood between both divisions at the sea, and there was another bulge inland in the unconquered Lake Susupe region.

Among the men, the veterans had ceased comparing Saipan to other battles and were rating it on its own merits. It was clear that Saipan was going to be a thing of dirt and strain, of heat and thirst, of clouds of flies, of clanging steel and splintering rock. It would be a point-by-point advance against an invisible, dogged, slowly retreating enemy—a foe who had already mystified them by whisking away his dead.

So they lay down that night in the ruins of the sugar refinery with which the fast battleships had had such aimless sport-failing even to kill its single occupant, that valorous Japanese soldier who hid in its chimney to call down artillery on the enemy Marines-or they lay down in the muck and stench of pigpens and chicken runs, on the hot smoldering earth of the blackened canebrakes, under the guns of Mount Fina Susa, and beneath the bursting, crashing glare of their own star-shells, illumination so brilliant that it seemed to make the bougainvillaea trees things of airy flame.

Opposite them the enemy was stirring. The counterattack was preparing. The men of Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito were in high spirits. For everyone in the Marianas seemed to know that the Combined Fleet was coming to the rescue. Admiral Nagumo had told General Saito so. As far away as Guam, Lieutenant Rai Imanishi was writing in his diary: “The Combined Fleet is about to engage the enemy in decisive combat…. The enemy has already begun landing on Saipan. Truly, we are on the threshold of momentous occurrences. Now is the time for me to offer my life for the great cause and be a barrier against the enemy advancing in the Pacific Ocean.”

Although he would have to wait a month or more for his chance on Guam, Lieutenant Imanishi was right. The Combined Fleet was indeed coming. Admiral Soemu Toyoda had bitten hard on the Saipan bait.

On the morning of June 15 the word of the Saipan invasion was flashed by Nagumo to Admiral Toyoda at his headquarters on Japan’s Inland Sea. At five minutes to nine that morning, Admiral Toyoda sent this message to all his commanders:

The Combined Fleet will attack the enemy in the Marianas area and annihilate the invasion force.

Five minutes later, suddenly mindful that it was close to the thirty-ninth anniversary of Admiral Togo’s destruction of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, Toyoda bethought himself of the immortal Togo’s words on that occasion and flashed them to the Combined Fleet:

The fate of the Empire rests on this one battle. Every man is expected to do his utmost.

It was, to the Japanese mind, the tocsin of total battle. It brought the carriers of Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa up from Tawi Tawi to the narrow waters of San Bernardino Strait, bound for their Philippine Sea rendezvous with a battleship force led by Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki. It brought the Japanese fleet out fighting for the first time since Guadalcanal.

Exhilarated by the great news, the Japanese on Saipan attacked all along the line. From dark until dawn there was hardly a moment when enemy shells were not falling on the Marines or the enemy was not probing for the weak spot against which he would launch his full fury. At about eight o’clock on the night of June 15, the Japanese thought they had found a hole on the front held by the command-riddled Second Battalion, Sixth.

At that time, the Japanese began moving down the coastal road from Garapan. They came in columns of platoons, riding tanks, trucks, anything that rolled-coming with the customary clamor of a traveling circus. At ten o’clock they were close enough to attack. Flags were unfurled. Samurai sabers flashed and glinted in the moonlight. Someone made a speech. A bugle blared—and the Japanese charged.