Robert Leckie - Strong Men Armed

On June 25, Chamberlin and Tompkins conferred with Colonel Clarence Wallace, commander of the Eighth, and got up a plan to take Tapotchau.

While Tompkins’ men went up the valley, Chamberlin’s battalion was to attack along the ridge, where the bulk of enemy opposition could be expected.

But it was the valley that was nastiest. Tompkins’ men ran into rough terrain and a stubborn enemy, while Chamberlin’s Marines were moving swiftly along the heights, advancing as far as a 50-foot cliff which crowned Tapotchau like a top hat. Chamberlin sent a patrol up the cliff. The men returned with the report that the crest of Tapotchau seemed unoccupied.

The patrol’s return coincided with the arrival of Tommy Tompkins from the valley below. He brought with him a platoon from the Division Scout Company, for he had become convinced that a frontal attack up the mountain was impossible. He took the Scouts up the steep side of Tapotchau’s top hat. They were all but exhausted by the rigor of that climb, but at eleven o’clock in the morning there was no longer anything above them.

They broke into the clear, into the open where their helmets touched the sky, and all around them rolled the vast smoking, glinting, glittering, moving panorama of an ocean island under assault from the sea. They stood at almost the exact center of Saipan, with the northern extremity of Marpi Point on the west coast seven miles in front of them and the southern tip of Nafutan Point slanting the same distance to the rear on the east coast.

Tompkins ordered the Scouts to hold the crest while he returned to the valley to get his battalion. They occupied a 12-foot-square dugout abandoned by the enemy during the day’s shelling. They fought from it to hold off repeated Japanese thrusts at them, while all around Tapotchau the ridges shook to furious Marine onslaught calculated to pin the Japanese main body down while Tompkins’ men came up from the valley single-file.

At dusk, Tompkins and his men clawed their way up to the crest-where the Scouts had killed 40 Japanese while losing three of their own men. They, too, dug in. They hurled back the inevitable nocturnal counterattack, holding Tapotchau even as destroyers and rocket boats offshore shattered an attempt to reinforce southern Saipan by barge.

On the same night, Lieutenant General Saito began to tell Tokyo the truth about what was happening on his island. He signaled the chief of staff in Tokyo:

Please apologize deeply to the Emperor that we cannot do better than we are doing. However, because of the units sunk at sea, the various forces have no fighting strength, although they do have large numbers.

There is no hope for victory in places where we do not have control of the air and we are still hoping here for aerial reinforcements.

Praying for the good health of the Emperor, we all cry, “Banzai!”

The aerial reinforcements for which Saito still hoped would never come. Only the day before, Vice Admiral Joseph (Jocko) Clark’s carrier force had raided Iwo Jima and destroyed 95 fighters and bombers at a loss of six Hellcats. On the very day of Tapotchau’s fall, June 25, another American carrier force struck hard at air bases on Guam and Rota.

There was nothing for this ailing and aged commander to do but to retreat north and await the end made so clearly inevitable to him by the constant presence of those circling, booming American warships.

The Japanese cornered on Nafutan Point were preparing to break out of the trap.

Since the capture of Isely Field on June 18, these 600 soldiers of the 47th Brigade’s 317th Infantry Battalion had been holed up on their stern-browed peninsula-endlessly pounded by offshore American warships or battered by artillery supporting the American 105th Infantry blocking their escape route north. On the night of June 26, having eaten the last of their food and drunk their water, they prepared to make a break-out born of desperation. Their commanding officer, one Captain Sasaki, issued this final order:

“Casualties will remain in their present positions and defend Nafutan Point. Those who cannot participate in combat must commit suicide. The password for tonight will be Shichi Sei Hokoku [Seven Lives to Repay Our Country].”

Shortly after midnight, Sasaki’s men slipped down from their high caves and stole through the outposts of the 105th Infantry. Many of them wore American uniforms, most of them were half-crazed with thirst-and all were bent on destroying Isely Field before wheeling east to Hill 500, where Captain Sasaki imagined brigade headquarters to be.

On Hill 500, most of Jumpin’ Joe Chambers’ men were already asleep.

The battalion had been placed in reserve, along with the remainder of the Twenty-fifth Marines, and ordered back to the hill they had captured on June 20.

Men such as Pfc. Tom McQuabe and Pfc. Bill Cramford-a BAR team holding down a foxhole outpost to the south or rear of Chambers’ command post—could hear the sound of sporadic firing to the north and be grateful for the chance to rest behind the lines.

Captain Sasaki’s band had gotten past the American soldiers. By two o’clock in the morning they had penetrated about a mile to the north. They blundered into the 2nd Battalion, 105th Infantry’s command post and fought a savage close-in fight, inflicting 24 casualties on the soldiers while losing 27 of their own men. Then they swept on to Isely Field, reaching it a half-hour later.

The Japanese set one P-47 on fire and damaged a few others, before they were beaten off by a counterattack of Seabees and Marine engineers. Sasaki’s men turned right and headed for Hill 500, about three miles above them. It was getting light.

“Japs!”

Tom McQuabe and Bill Cramford yelled the warning with a single astonished voice, even as they saw the short men slipping through the half-light toward Hill 500.

The Japanese replied by hurling a grenade which landed in the Marines’ outpost foxhole and wounded McQuabe. Cramford got his BAR going, shooting off three clips before he, too, was wounded—and the Japanese rushed past screeching, “Shichi sei hokoku!”

Huddled in a hole beneath a strip of galvanized iron, Pfc. Jim Ferguson and Pfc. Ed Martin heard the shrieking and the sound of gunfire. Ferguson knocked aside the roof with the muzzle of his tommy gun. A helmeted Japanese stared down at him. Ferguson shot him dead with a stream of .45 slugs. Now Sasaki’s men-many of them armed with only “idiot sticks”—were hacking wildly at the Marines. One of them bayoneted Pfc. Robert Postal-but Postal killed him with a rifle shot as he struggled to withdraw the blade. Another knocked Pfc. Jim Davie down with a shovel. A third charged Pfc. Ken Rayburn with a lowered bayonet. Rayburn’s carbine jammed. He seized a pick mattock and hurled it into the Japanese’s stomach.

While Chambers’ men quickly recovered from the surprise of finding the “front” to their rear, the rest of the Japanese were battling with the artillerists of the Second Battalion, Fourteenth Marines.

The American uniforms they wore helped them get close to the artillerymen between Isely Field and Hill 500. The Marines let them come, mistaking them for an Army patrol scheduled to appear at about that time.

By the time a sharp-eyed Marine yelled, “Those ain’t doggies, those are Japs!”—it was almost too late. But the machine guns set up by the artillerymen to protect their guns opened up quickly. The battle raged on for most of the morning, until the men of the Fourteenth Marines had killed 143 of the attackers and lost 33 killed and wounded themselves, and the Twenty-fifth Marines had come down from Hill 500 and cleaned out the remainder of Sasaki’s band.

It had not been anything like “seven lives to repay our country.” It had been a massacre. And as the men of the Twenty-fifth turned to march back to Hill 500, they stopped to watch a Japanese bomber trying to get down through the storm of antiaircraft fire puffing over Isely Field.