During the night, on final approach, all hands in Kelly
Turner’s four transport divisions had been impressed by the flashes of
bombardment silently lighting the horizon ahead. Drawing closer to Saipan, they
whiffed its acrid waste, sharp on nostrils and tongues. On June 15, the eastern
sky was brightening over the light southeasterly swells. Each transport
division embarked a Marine regiment, approached Saipan’s hundred-fathom line,
and entered the outer transport area off the western shore.
An officer in one of the transports, a veteran of Sicily and
Salerno, looked at the black form of Mount Tapotchau, backlit by twilight, and
said, “That silhouette is made to order for a night landing under a good moon.
Every natural landmark stands out. Perfect, I say, except she’s coral-bound.
That’s the gimmick.”
The Fifth Amphibious Force, having finished its oceanic
transit, prepared to make its power felt on land. On board the LCI gunboats,
the smallest commissioned ships in Turner’s task force, all hands turned to,
unpacking and loading their abundance of rockets. Marines in the transports and
amtracs and LSTs checked their weapons, breathed deeply to calm their nerves.
Draper Kauffman and his UDT reviewed the results of their lagoon
reconnaissance. Kelly Turner signaled to Harry Hill, “TAKE CHARGE. GOOD LUCK.”
In the dawning daylight of “the other D Day,” transports began lowering boats.
The drone of radial engines manifested over Saipan before
six A.M., when the commander of the Enterprise air group, Bill “Killer” Kane,
arrived on station to serve as air coordinator of the day’s flying circus
covering the assault. His first order of business was to direct an air strike
set for H Hour, 0830. With him: a dozen Hellcats to provide combat air patrol
over the landing force and eight Avengers to encourage Tojo’s submarines to
keep a respectful distance.
Surveying the armada below—the transports bearing three
divisions, battleships worthy of Jutland, the sheer numerosity of Turner’s
tractor fleet, dropping from davits and gathering in the assembly areas—Kane
had little sense that his day would come to an early end. As he flew over the
transport area, the air bursts began. Anxious gunners in Turner’s invasion
fleet had his range. One of the shells was close enough to fill Kane’s cowling
with steel. Riddled by friendly fire, his engine began to smoke and he began
spiraling down to the sea. He had enough horses to keep his nose up and manage
a water landing. He would be rescued later and returned to his carrier. But his
forced relief from duty by that spooked antiaircraft crew served to promote
James D. “Jig Dog” Ramage, skipper of Bombing Ten, to Kane’s post as air
coordinator. He would look after the H Hour air strike and the subsequent close
support of the troops. Circling at two thousand feet, in awe of the spectacle
below, he, too, kept a respectful distance.
Though Harry Hill had immediate command of landing
operations, Kelly Turner made sure to retain certain privileges of overall
command. He had thought through the location of every ship in the plan. His
talent, his admirers said, was a meticulous, hands-on approach to crafting a
war plan; in Washington, at Main Navy, he had practiced the state of the art at
the level of high strategy. The invasion of Saipan marked his return to the
tactical; his talent poured forth into crafting the plan. “He carried it in his
own mind,” Hogaboom said. “He rarely had to refer to the plans, although the
plans were voluminous. He supervised, himself, the actual maneuver and the
actual position of the ships as they approached a position at D Day. He was
determined to meet his D Days. He was determined to meet his H Hours.” What
followed from there would be up to the Marines.
It wasn’t yet six when Turner issued the order he always
deemed his due: “Land the landing force.” The dispatch set his numerous
assembly into motion. The bow ramps of LSTs swung open, releasing amtracs to
roll forward. LSDs opened their stern gates and began disgorging LCMs bearing
waterproofed tanks, which, tightly packed in the well deck, slid down the ramp
and entered the sea, bouncing once or twice, then motoring smoothly atop the
swells. After reporting to the control officer at the line of departure of
their assigned beach, they would stand by until they were needed, on call, not
belonging to any particular wave. The amtracs approached the transports, cargo
nets draped over the side, and Marines began mounting up.
North of the main assembly area, another group of transports
milled at sea. Carrying a regiment from each of the two Marine divisions, they
were assigned to make a feint, a diversionary landing that Turner hoped would
freeze Japanese troops in place and prevent them from moving south from Tanapag
into the Charan Kanoa landing area.
#
At 6:30, two hours before H Hour, the transports of the
diversionary force began hoisting out their boats off Tanapag. More than a
hundred LCVPs formed in the assembly area and then came alongside the
transports to simulate the embarkation of troops of the Second Regiment of the
Second Marine Division, and the 24th Regiment of the Fourth, as well as a
battalion of the 29th Marines. For several minutes the boats remained alongside
the transports, rising and falling beside the nets, then shoved off for the
rendezvous area while smoke boats and control vessels took positions near a
plausible line of departure. The setup consumed more than an hour, in the hope
that the Japanese were watching from shore. On a signal from the commander of
the control group, the charade ended. The landing boats reversed course and
returned to the transports to be hauled back aboard. Generals Watson and
Schmidt would use them as their floating reserve.
It was seven A.M. when the LST group carrying the two
assault regiments of the Fourth Marine Division stopped outside the rendezous
area and began launching amtracs. Crabbing down the nets from the transports,
armed men filled the tractors. The sense of it was vivid, the feeling of
starting in. Robert Graf checked his cartridge belt, heavily loaded with ammo;
shifted the straps of the weighty bandoliers that pinched his shoulders; vetted
his first aid kit and two canteens of water; tested his pack, loaded with items
he might never use or that might save a life, one could never tell which. With
all its useful things, the pack was heavy enough that, under fire, it might
plausibly claim his own. On his right leg were a Ka-Bar in its sheath and a
throwing knife holstered like a gun. His gas mask went over the shoulder, its
bulk hanging in the way as he reached for his rifle, checking its action, and
grabbed a life belt. He looked up from his kit. “Now our group was standing,
waiting to start.”
Lieutenant Carl Roth came over and looked him over as his
quadriceps burned, spun him around to survey his gear. Like all platoon commanders,
Roth wore no insignia—it only encouraged snipers—and was underarmed, carrying a
carbine instead of an M-1 Garand. Roth led his men into the hold of the LST-84,
where they found their amtracs. They were Army vehicles belonging to the 708th
Amphibian Tank Battalion. The tractors were ready for them, engines running,
fumes fouling the air. The Marines piled in and took their places. Waiting and
listening, then waiting some more, they finally heard the grinding of gears,
telling them at last that they would soon be on their way. They heard the crash
of the bow doors opening and the propulsive sensation of rolling forward. Down
they went, out the ramp. Nosing down, the LVTs dropped into the Pacific. The
coxswains raced their engines, whose whining revolutions belied their
pedestrian’s speed toward the line of departure.
The Army crews were largely veteran tankers, hastily
retrained as demand for amtrac personnel surged. The one hundred LVTs of their
battalion had been hastily refitted, up-armored with extra steel plate at the
destroyer base in San Diego—half an inch on the bow and cab, a quarter inch on
the sides and the ramp. It was seven o’clock when the amtracs carrying the 25th
Marines were underway to the assembly area. Ten minutes later, the LSTs embarking
two regiments from the Second Marine Division dropped ramps and released their
alligators.
#
Looking toward shore from the line of departure, three
thousand yards out from the reef, each coxswain drew a bead on the major
landmarks that showed him the way. Three in particular stood out. There was
Mount Tapotchau, straight ahead to the east. The pier at Garapan was up the
coast to the left; the dock at Charan Kanoa jutted out between Green and Blue
beaches, fronting the town and its gable-roofed buildings. As they drew closer,
details came into focus. The beach, a ribbon of crushed coral just ten to
fifteen yards deep. Shrubs atop the beachfront bluff. Groves of trees on higher
slopes farther inland. A coastal road and a narrow-gauge rail line that connected
Saipan’s west-coast towns, Charan Kanoa, Garapan, and Tanapag. The clearing
behind the Green beaches held an airstrip, and three high towers of a radio
station sat to its north.
The Sixth and Eighth regiments of General Watson’s Second
Marine Division would go ashore on the left, north of Charan Kanoa, at Red and
Green beaches. The 23rd and 25th regiments of the Fourth Division, under
Schmidt, would land on the right, south of the town, on Blue and Yellow
beaches. Each of the regiments’ battalion landing teams was responsible for a
six-hundred-yard section of beach, this being the width deemed optimal for the
delivery of a Marine battalion’s concentrated force as well as its lifeline of
waterborne supply.
#
The largest units of troops—divisions and regiments—were
governed abstractly, maneuvered by generals on rubber topographic models and
seldom seen in person unless embarked on board ship or arrayed for review. An
infantry regiment had about thirty-three hundred men. Its basic unit of
maneuver was the battalion. Fortified with heavy weapons companies and
engineers, a battalion landing team, under the command of a lieutenant colonel,
had thirty-three officers, two or three Navy surgeons, and forty corpsmen. The
key line officers were the captains of the two-hundred-fifty-man companies, and
their principals in turn were the lieutenants leading the forty-six-man
platoons. Below them—arguably of even greater importance—were the sergeants of
the thirteen-man squads and the corporals of the fire teams of four. Companies,
platoons, and squads, large to small, were the units that most powerfully
shaped and held the fortunes and memories of individual men.
Robert Graf ducked low while waves crested the bow of his
amtrac, torrents of salty spray washing over the Marines inside. The gunner up
front got the worst of the sea shower. “Being low in the water, we were unable
to see much of what was going on,” Graf said. “Slowly we went forward until we
were in our assigned departure area. We started our circling, waiting.” He had
time to think of his parents and two sisters, and of the inferno that had
nearly engulfed him at West Loch. His unit, Easy Company, Second Battalion,
23rd Marines, was going ashore on Blue Beach Two. He wasn’t sure it would go
well.
Overhead, carrier planes were reporting on station. Turner’s
plan called for a sweep against enemy positions to take place at H Hour minus
90, and now it began, a droning horde mustered not by Mitscher but by the
escort carriers of the support groups. Each of the eight small flattops in the
two CVE task units put up eight FM-2 Wildcats and a quartet of Avengers, wings
sagging with a load of eight five-inch high-explosive rockets and a dozen
hundred-pound bombs tucked in their bellies. Specialists in troop support, they
bore down fast, roaring over the amtracs, the reef, and the gentle lagoon. The
Wildcats strafed the beach head-on, followed at thirty-second intervals by the
Avengers, which attacked in pairs, two planes to a beach. They let fly their
rockets, dropped their frags, and retired across the island.
Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito, was the commander of
the army’s 43rd Division and the senior Japanese Army officer on Saipan. But Saito’s
guns were still silent. There was nothing for his inland artillery and mortars
to shoot at yet. Captain Whitehead, Turner’s commander of support aircraft, was
eager to keep things that way. To stop a Japanese counterattack on the landing
area, he passed what was known about the locations of Japanese gun and troop
positions to Commander Ramage, the air coordinator from the Enterprise. But the
carrier pilots struggled all day long to find targets through the cloak of
smoke that rose after the naval bombardment. The Japanese had gone to ground
under ingenious schemes of camouflage. The air strikes lacked the volume and
sustenance required of an effective area bombing attack. Turner meant it more
to demoralize and suppress the defenders than to wipe them out. His belief that
planes could do what ships couldn’t might have been the optimism of a man who
had never flown a strike aircraft under fire. If the enemy could not move
beneath this storm of lead and shrapnel, they usually found the wherewithal to
hunker down and endure, looking to survive until a more opportune hour.
After thirty minutes, the air strike ended and the planes
returned to their carriers. Admiral Hill took over as preparatory naval gunfire
resumed. The California drenched Red Beach with everything she had, but after
pouring white phosphorus rounds inshore of Red Beach One, she ceased fire when
some of her shells burst prematurely, casting smoky streaks of the incendiary
chemical over the assembly area. There, a control boat dropped a flag, and a
column of LCI gunboats motoring along the line of departure executed
simultaneous ninety-degree turns and set out toward shore. With a dozen of them
allocated to each beach, surging along in a single rank, they would offer the
final salvo of preparatory fire before the amtracs went in. Diversely
configured with 20 and 40 mm guns, rails bristling with 4.5-inch rockets, the
gunboats were a mile and a half out when mortars and artillery began falling
around them. The incoming fire surprised Captain Inglis in the Birmingham, on
station with the Indianapolis on the division boundary line, firing at targets
on Green Beach. Inglis had not expected so many Japanese guns to remain in
action. The gunboat crews pulled the pins on their rockets, five hundred at a
time, and threw the switches that armed the launchers.
On another signal from the control boat, the first wave of
amtracs came to the line of departure. The first wave was anchored in the
center by a seven-vehicle wedge of LVT(A)s. The amtanks were arrayed like an
arrowhead pointed toward the enemy. Flanking the wedge to each side was a rank
of six troop-carrying LVTs. Without fanfare, the coxswain in Robert Graf’s
amtrac opened the throttle and his engine’s song went from gurgle to growl to
roaring whine. Led by an LVT(A) serving as the wave guide, flying a numbered
flag at the point of the wedge, the first assault wave, nineteen vehicles
strong, followed the LCI gunboats in the Second Division landing area. From Red
Beach One in the north to Green Beach Two in the south, the full two-regiment
line consisted of seventy amtanks and forty-eight LVTs carrying eight Marine
infantry battalions to shore. The second wave departed the line four minutes
later, followed by the third wave six minutes after it. As Graf’s amtrac passed
the Norman Scott, a voice on the destroyer’s PA system called out, “God bless
you all!”
Inglis had not seen its like, this parade of ferocious small
ships motoring toward the reef in formation, followed at close intervals by
rank after rank of amtanks and amtracs. As he looked out to sea, the spectacle
of the LCI gunboats in their rush, leading the first wave of troop-laden
alligators, took his breath away. He had what he called a “$6.60 orchestra
seat, close enough to see the anxious but determined expressions of the faces
of the Marines in the landing craft.”
When the LCI gunboats were just fifty yards from the reef,
the signal to fire came. Within three seconds five hundred rockets were
airborne. The parade spectacle vanished in the backwash of smoke. A gray carpet
covered the waters beyond the reef, and though the winds pushed it seaward, it
was heavy enough to obscure the landing area from view. No targets of
opportunity were apparent. All the gunboat rocketeers could do was smother
their assigned sectors in high explosives. After two salvos were off the rails,
five shifted from beach to bluff.
Carrier planes struck inland targets. Flying low over the
first wave, fighters showered the alligator fleet with brass cartridges. When
the LCIs were finished, their long single rank opened like a double pocket
door, half splitting away to the left, half to the right. Through the opening
came the first wave of amtracs, churning through smoke toward the reef. “As the
troops came abreast and passed us,” one gunboat crewman wrote, “an eerie
silence fell. All that could be heard was the whine of the amtracs.”
Lieutenant Roth told his platoon, “Lock and load your
pieces. Fix bayonets.” There were crisp metallic sounds as eight-round clips
went into their rifles and bolts were snapped forward, pushing the first shell
into the chamber. Robert Graf turned on his safety, reached over his shoulder,
took his bayonet from his pack, and fitted it on the end of his rifle, keeping
the butt on the deck and muzzle skyward. As the beach drew closer, perceptions
grew sharper.
In the Fourth Marine Division’s landing area, amtracs
carrying the 23rd and 25th Marines moved past the Tennessee to either side. The
battleship hit the sugar mill with her main battery, then enfiladed the
southernmost beach, Yellow Three, concentrating on gun positions near Agingan
Point. “The beaches were a mass of smoke,” Captain A. D. Mayer would write,
“but the Mark Eight radar operator could effectively observe the salvo landing
on the beach on his radar screen, and control same.” But pinpoint accuracy was
an illusion on an A scope. Two days earlier the Indiana had put sixty-three
high-capacity sixteen-inch shells into that strongpoint, but still the Japanese
were in business. Tests had revealed that the burst of a sixteen-inch
high-explosive projectile would shock but not destroy emplacements built from
sand and coconut logs. “These bursting projectiles would have great disruptive
effect but doubtful penetrating power,” Admiral Hill said. The Marines would
pay the price.
To hold formation, the amtrac drivers kept an eye to their
periscopes, watching ahead while also checking the line to each side. Holding
steady amid the waves and slow-moving tide, worrying (but not too much) about
the high-angle barrage the Japanese were sending them, the drivers consulted
one another on the radio, keeping their line tight. Crawling toward Green Beach
One, Marshall E. Harris was talking to his best friend from radio school,
Robert B. Lewis, in an amtank nearby. He was asking him if they’d drifted too
far left when Lewis’s voice vanished beneath an explosion. Harris felt a
concussion, then heard another explosion. Turning his periscope to the side, he
saw black smoke and fire on the water. “Flames boiled out of blackened, bent
metal hatches—Bob’s tank.” His platoon commander, Lieutenant Michael, motioned
to him to keep going. He never saw Lewis again.
As the cleated tracks of the amtracs mounted the reef, their
hydrostatic transmissions dropped automatically into low gear, enabling the
heavy vehicles to haul themselves up and over. The surf could make things
dicey. Off Red Beach, large swells were crashing hard over the reef. A coxswain
had to time his approach such that the wave cupped his transom and carried them
onto the reef. He would have to keep moving, for the next swell would bid to
roll him over or swamp his engine while he was still on the coral. As the
amtracs clawed over the reef, the California, off Red Beach, and the Tennessee,
off Yellow, shifted to targets farther inland, beyond the map line that Holland
Smith had set as the first day’s objective for his Marines. Known as the O-1
line (for “Objective One”), it roughly paralled the beach about fifteen hundred
yards inland. The Birmingham kept watch off Afetna Point while the Norman
Scott, Monssen, and other destroyers moved close, released by Admiral Hill to
the freelancing counterbattery missions that destroyermen relished. Two
thousand yards offshore, between the boat lanes leading to Blue and Yellow
beaches, the Norman Scott fired on gun positions near Blue Beach One. As her
captain, Seymour D. Owens, watched the first wave of amtracs go in, an
artillery shell landed close off the forecastle, wounding three men. Hammering
the bluffs to keep the enemy’s heads down, the destroyers kept at it until the
first amtrac wave was about three hundred yards from shore, then trained out to
the flanks. Dropping into the calm lagoon waters, the amtracs began the last
leg to shore.
