Robert Leckie - Strong Men Armed

In the morning Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson joined the battalion as a division observer while Jumpin’ Joe led his men farther north toward Tapotchau. In two days they had overrun Hill 500’S peaks and were debouching into a valley beyond.

There they walked into a trap. Machine guns to either side began chattering and mortars could be seen rising from a clump of woods to the front. Pfc. Vito Cassaro, Chambers’ radioman, was hit almost immediately. Chambers and Carlson went out to rescue him and bullets made smacking sounds in someone’s flesh.

“I’m hit,” Carlson gasped.

The famous Raider leader had been shot in the leg and another bullet had shattered an arm. He was dragged to safety, along with Cassaro, and placed on a stretcher.

“Last time I was wounded was the First World War,” he told Chambers. “If I can keep ‘em that far apart I’ll be all right.”

He was carried to the rear, still chomping on his foul pipe while he dictated a memo covering the location of a new division command post. Behind him, as Chambers’ Marines pulled out of the valley pocket, it was seen that there was still a wounded man lying out in the open. He was unconscious. His crumpled body made a fine aiming reference for the Japanese gunners in the woods beyond. Each time someone crawled out for him, a spate of bullets drove him back.

Then the tanks arrived. A Sherman commanded by Lieutenant Robert Stevenson lumbered out into the valley with bullets spanging harmlessly off its steel hide. The Sherman straddled the unconscious Marine. It rolled forward and obscured him.

“Open the escape hatch and drag him in,” Stevenson ordered.

It was done, the man was saved—and the other tanks joined Stevenson to lead the advance. Half-tracks and 37’s also came up. The emplaced Japanese began to withdraw.

“Come get us, Marines,” they cried.

“Take your time, boys,” the Marines replied. “We will.”

The Japanese began blowing up positions and supplies. They blew up an ammunition dump near the battalion CP and the blast knocked Jumpin’ Joe Chambers unconscious.

He was taken to the rear while Major Jim Taul took command, but the moment Chambers had regained consciousness he was on his feet and demanding the return of his weapons.

“But you can’t go back there, sir,” said the battalion surgeon.

“You’re a casualty.”

“Casualty, hell!” Jumpin’ Joe exploded. “You’ll have to lock me up if you want to keep me here.”

Chambers returned to his battalion, but to his ill-concealed annoyance, and to the unconcealed delight of Major Taul, the objective had already been taken. All along the line by late afternoon of June 22, the Fourth Division had gained 2,000 yards. On the left the Second Division held half of Mount Tipo Pale and was prepared to strike Mount Tapotchau itself about 600 yards northeast.

By nightfall of this eighth day of battle about six of Saipan’s 14 miles in length were in American hands. This represented most of the southern half of the island, although there was still a Japanese pocket down at Nafutan Point on the southernmost tip of the east coast. The Japanese on Nafutan—about 500 of them—had been bypassed in the rush to take Aslito Airfield. They were now hemmed in by the 27th Division’s 105th Infantry, which was preparing to clean out the point.

Elsewhere on Saipan the engineers had made rapid progress on improving the airfield-now called Isely Field after the Navy flier who was killed in preinvasion attacks on it-and they were hauling supplies from the Charan Kanoa beachhead about three miles to the northwest by means of a narrow-gauge railway formerly employed in the Charan Kanoa sugar industry. Isely Field was fit to receive squadrons of Army P-47 Thunderbolts assigned to Saipan combat patrol and scheduled to arrive the following day. Out on the bay the battleship Maryland was holed on her port side by a Japanese aerial torpedo strike launched the afternoon of June 22. She would have to return to Pearl Harbor.

The next day, June 23, the three-division attack to the north planned by Howlin’ Mad Smith at last got going. The 27th Division-less its 105th Infantry still south at Nafutan Point —went into the line between the Second Marine Division on the left and the Fourth on the right.

The Fourth again made good gains, although the attack was still a matter of climbing another mountain to behold another mountain. The division’s chief objective this day was Hill 600, guarding the entrance to Kagman Peninsula, which stretched east into Magicienne Bay for about three miles. The Marines of the Fourth took Hill 600 and renamed it Hot Potato Hill for the fierce hand-grenade fight which won it. Then they swerved right or east to bite deep into Kagman Peninsula. They could have gone farther, but the 27th Division in the center was unable to move because of resistance met in a crackling lowland called Death Valley. The Fourth halted and dug in, for the lag in the center had exposed its left.

On the left of the three-division front the Second Division’s Marines began struggling up the cruel steeps of Mount Tapotchau-blundering through a jumble of limestone crags, lava heads and coral ridges, gullies, gulches and ravines, all piled one upon another as though kicked together, all exposed to the direct rays of a hot sun. All around Tapotchau were caves and subterranean forts from which Japanese artillery had attempted to destroy the Marines on the beaches. The short tan men of Nippon were still fighting from these, at closer, more accurate range now, and still invisibly.

Against them, against the slashing madness of Tapotchau itself, came the Sixth and Eighth Marine Regiments. They came without tanks, jeeps or bulldozers-for there was not even so much as a trail up the mountainside. They came warily, sending out probing patrols, waiting for the sound of firing which would signal that the patrol had found the enemy, and then going forward on foot, climbing.

But they advanced. And then, finding their right flank exposed by the 27th’s failure to make any appreciable gains, they too halted and dug in.

In the morning both the Second and the Fourth Marine Divisions moved out. But the 27th in the center was again slow, again unable to get through Death Valley. For the second straight day the attack was slowed down, and Lieutenant General Holland Smith relieved Major General Ralph Smith of his command of the 27th Division. The Army’s Major General Sanderford Jarman, who was to have been Saipan’s military governor, took Ralph Smith’s place. The pace of the attack began to quicken, but by nightfall there were still long vertical gaps between the Marine divisions ahead on the flanks and the 27th behind them in the center.

That night the Japanese counterattacked the Second Division’s front in the Tapotchau hills, coming in greatest strength against a machine-gun post held by Pfc. Harold Epperson with Corporal Malcom Jonah and Pfc. Edward Bailey. It was very dark. The Marines could barely make out the bulk of a dense wood about 50 yards away.

It was out of the wood that the Japanese came, running straight at Epperson’s pit. The young gunner opened fire. The short shapes began to fall. One of them seemed to crumple right under the muzzle of the gun. Epperson fired on. Suddenly the figure under the gun came alive. The Japanese jumped up. He tossed a grenade into the pit.

Pfc. Epperson threw himself on it and was killed.

He had saved the lives of his comrades and they were able to fight on and break up the attack—and he had won a posthumous Medal of Honor.

The following day-June 25—Mount Tapotchau’s peak was placed under direct assault.

Since June 22 the orphan First Battalion, Twenty-ninth, had been driving up a jumbled valley which ran between two ridges to Tapotchau’s crest. They had fought forward under Lieutenant Colonel Rathvon (Tommy) Tompkins, who had taken over after Lieutenant Colonel Guy Tannyhill had been wounded. They had been joined by the Second Battalion, Eighth, led by Jim Crowe’s executive, Major Chamberlin.