Saipan Landing II

The volume of incoming fire grew; neither the aircraft nor
the naval fire support had an answer for what the Japanese had installed on
Saipan’s reverse slopes. “There was a loud explosion to our right,” Robert Graf
wrote, “and we saw one of our craft exploding, bodies flying through the air.”

Carl Roth said, “Unlock your pieces. Good luck. Keep low,
and get inland as fast as you can and get off the beach. They’re zeroing in on
it.” Turner had overestimated the threat of beach defenses—pillboxes with
machine guns, fire trenches, antitank trenches, and the like. Artillery and
mortars located inland were the problem. He had underrated them. The clouds
obscuring the early reconnaissance photos hid the guns from Nimitz’s analysts.
They revealed themselves against the first waves.

Control officers off Blue and Yellow beaches reported the
first waves of the Fourth Marine Division ashore at 8:43. Five minutes later an
air observer reported the Second Marine Division’s amtracs piling onto Red and
Green beaches, though not always in the right place. Heavy fire poured into the
first wave from the shrub-topped bluff behind Red Three. Heavier fire enfiladed
them from Afetna Point, far to the right. The volume of it startled the
drivers, and even the slightest flinch at the wheel caused them to veer left,
carrying in the Sixth Marines farther north than they were supposed to be. The
same problem beset the Eighth Regiment, only worse, owing to a
northward-carrying tide. Both of its battalions landed on Green One, causing
congestion and a dangerous massing of forces there, as well as a void on Green
Two, just to the south. The architect of the Second Marine Division’s confusion
was a battery of heavy machine guns and antiboat guns on Afetna Point. Having
somehow survived the morning bombardment by the Birmingham and Indianapolis, it
enjoyed a run of terrible glory. Head still down, filled with silent prayer,
Robert Graf heard the smooth tenor of the engine change as his tracks bit into
the ground. His platoon was on the beach.

As the critical hour began ashore, the naval fire support
shifted inland, leaving the amtracs to their own devices. The bow gunners
trained their fifties on the thin ribbon of sand and scrub ahead as the mortars
and artillery continued their incessant high-angle fall. General Saito’s
artillerymen and mortar teams were in impressive form given the plastering that
had been leveled upon them from air and sea. Lofting shells on tall parabolas
from crevices, ravines, and the back sides of hills, they began taking a toll
on Turner’s force. The beach where Easy Company of the 2/23 went ashore, Blue
Beach Two, took a particularly brutal deluge. “More and more shells came
pounding at us and more tractors were hit,” wrote Graf. “Bodies, both whole and
in pieces, were scattered about.” He saw men mortally wounded but still alive,
floating with the aid of life jackets. The Marines left no man behind, except by
necessity at H Hour, when the imperative to get off the beach was existential.
The whole operation depended on it. Already, with the arrival of the second
wave, the boat lane was a bottleneck, with a huge inflow of machines grinding
through it.

Amtracs had their appeal, foremost their armor plate, which
was proof against all but the closest artillery rounds. But many veteran
Marines preferred the old LCVPs with their bow ramps, which when dropped
allowed them to make a quick low rush forward out of the hold. Amtracs, in
contrast, required them to stand up and dismount over the side, and that meant
exposing themselves to enemy fire. When Donald Boots hit the beach, enemy
gunners were waiting. The platoon sergeant and gunnery sergeant of his pioneer
company were shot dead along with a few other men. As bullets zipped overhead,
his platoon, deprived of their leadership, dropped to the beach and pressed
themselves into the crushed coral for cover. Boots moved left, bounding into a
large shell crater with several other men as machine gun fire whipped overhead.
When the mortars came, Boots didn’t think he would survive.

“It was really tragic to watch the effect of this mortar
fire on our own troops,” said Captain Inglis.

The Japanese were extremely accurate, and as they walked
this shellfire up the beach, this shellfire falling at about ten yard
intervals, our Marines at first stood up under the fire without flinching,
continued their operations of sorting out and transporting to front lines the
equipment which had been landed and which was lying on the beach. After the
first two or three shells had fallen it was quite apparent to us that the
Marines were beginning to flinch under the fire and at first they threw
themselves on the ground and then eventually, after this fire was continued,
broke and ran. Through high powered optical instruments we could almost see the
whiskers on men’s faces, and the whole impression that I received was something
unreal, something that you might see in the London Graphic, for instance, as
sketched in the imagination of an artist. It seemed almost too dramatic and too
close to be realistic.

Though the largest Japanese coastal guns had been easy for
the Navy to destroy, as they were sited conspicuously in fixed emplacements
vulnerable to direct fire, and beach positions evaporated quickly in the
initial barrage, the inland positions were trickier even when ship commanders
could see where the fire was coming from. “The mobilization of that mass of
field artillery and mortars on the reverse slope of the hills back of the
beaches was a complete unknown to us when we landed,” Hill said.

Captain Inglis felt a mounting frustration. “We tried our
best to determine the source of this fire, but the Japanese, being past masters
in the twin arts of playing possum and camouflage, had very successfully
concealed their batteries from observation and the source of the fire could not
be determined from observation from the ship, or from the spotters ashore, nor
from observation from aircraft, nor from photographs taken by aircraft.” There
were many eyes on D Day, but none were all-seeing. It remained to the
assaulters to push forward and deliver themselves from death.

The Second Armored Amphibian Battalion, a Marine outfit, hit
Red Beach One promptly at H Hour. General Watson, who hadn’t wanted to use his
regular amtracs as fighting vehicles on land, had his men debark from the
troop-carrying LVTs immediately, to begin the fight in the footprint of the
tides. As LVTs unloaded elements of the Second Battalion, Sixth Marines, high
on the beach, the unit’s seventeen LVT(A)-4 amtanks sought routes inland, to
serve as a sort of mobile amphibious armored striking force. Their crews were
freelancers as soon as they went ashore, and thus they acquired a fearsome
responsibility: to use their thin-skinned “armored pigs” to hold the exposed
far left flank of the entire two-division landing beach. This meant facing off
against anything the Japanese might send them from the north. Turner had
anticipated this; the whole purpose of the feint he had carried out off Garapan
was to let the first two battalions of the Sixth Marine Regiment get ashore and
dig in before a counterattack came.

“I never will forget the concussion of the battleships’ guns
and the power and compression that blew over us,” remembered R. J. Lee. The
driver of his amtank was looking to push inland off the beach, but with a deep
trench just behind the shrub line there was no way forward. He threw the pig
into reverse and backed out to the water’s edge, where he unlimbered the 75 mm
cannon and began blasting to cut a navigable lane. The Japanese had built only
the simplest of defensive works, thanks to the efforts of U.S. submarines to
strangle their source of supply. But their trenches, foxholes, and log obstacles
near the beach were made reasonably effective by the pressure of artillery and
mortar fire coming from the highlands far away. Marine amtanks on Red Beach
struggled to get over the bluffs behind the beaches. Lee had gotten off perhaps
four shots when Japanese artillery found his range. The open turret took a
direct hit. Before the smoke washed everything black, Lee saw his platoon
leader and two of his sergeants dead.

“Let’s get the hell out of here before she blows up,”
another sergeant said to the five survivors. The amtank’s seven-cylinder radial
aircraft engine, owing to the aviation gasoline that fed it, was always a fire
hazard. They shimmied through the escape hatch into the water and turned and
charged the beach, weapons held high. Lee looked to his right and saw one of
his crew, Gus Evans, rifle raised over his head, take a bullet to the face and
go down. He was reaching for him when he, too, was hit. Two head shots—one a
ricochet, the other penetrating the helmet but somehow retaining only enough
force to knock him cold. “Lights out for me,” Lee said. “I heard my
four-year-old son calling, ‘Get up, Daddy, get up, Daddy,’ and by the grace of
God and my son I made it back to the beach.”

On Red Three, a trio of amtanks under the command of
Lieutenant Philo Pease found a path through a grove of trees and made it up
onto the bluff. Crossing a narrow road, they approached a trenchworks. The lead
vehicle tried to cross it but came to grief, stuck fast, treads clawing the
air. According to the driver, S. A. Balsano, Japanese soldiers were “on us like
flies.” There was no way forward, or back, either, for the rear amtank was
stuck, too. Lieutenant Pease realized their only hope was to get moving again,
or artillery would surely find them. He saw that the second amtank in his
column, the one right behind him, might be able to pull the third one free of
its snag. He ordered his crew to stay with their stranded lead vehicle and try
to break it free while he ran outside, exposing himself in order to help the commander
behind him to rig a tow cable. As a cluster of enemy troops approached, one of
Pease’s crew, Leroy Clobes, stuck a light machine gun through the side hatch
and leaned into the trigger, scattering them. Balsano, the driver, jammed his
Thompson through the front hatch and jackhammered away. Then they realized that
the foreign voices they had heard were coming from the trench beneath them.

Pease reached the amtank behind him only to find himself
going to the assistance of a dead man. A Japanese soldier had drawn a bead on
the other commander and shot him dead where he stood. Ducking low under fire,
Pease inherited the job of attaching the cable. The enemy rifleman chambered
another round and took him down next. A corporal in Pease’s amtank, Paul
Durand, took command, shouting, “Shoot all the sons of bitches you can!” Nearby
he spotted a straw house that seemed to harbor an enemy squad. Traversing the
75 mm gun onto it, he blew it right down. At that point a Japanese light tank
appeared and put a 37 mm round through the hull of the third amtank in line,
killing the driver. Marine bazookamen put the enemy armored vehicle out of
business in turn, but here, exposed under merciless direct fire, was the root
of General Watson’s worry all along: Amtracs were sitting ducks. Lieutenant
Pease’s surviving crew were lucky. Inspecting their stranded amphibian later,
one of them found a magnetic mine fastened to the undercarriage. Somehow it had
failed to explode.

South of them, Green Beach One was chaos, its six-hundred-yard
frontage hopelessly congested after the arrival of two full battalions. The
commanders of the first wave’s amtanks tried to deepen the beachhead by driving
inland. Their advance was conspicuous to the well-spotted mortarmen and
artillery gunners in the hills. Coming under heavy plunging fire, several of
the amtanks became bogged down in a rice paddy. Two others, driven by Sergeant
Benjamin R. Livesey and Sergeant Onel W. Dickens, pushed on. Crossing the end
of the single runway paralleling Green Beach, they turned up a dirt road
leading north past the Japanese radio station. The road was little more than a
cart path, barely wide enough for two-way traffic. Along it they clattered,
fortunate to evade the incoming fire. A Japanese machine gun nest, then another,
revealed themselves with spitting tracers. The armored amphibians turned the
fury of their 75 mm howitzers and .50- and .30-caliber machine guns onto them,
to overwhelming effect. Passing through a banana grove, Livesey realized its
value as cover and stopped there as the mortars continued to fall. As the crew
crouched low, they heard the chatter of small arms fire as Japanese soldiers
opened up on them from down the road. “We scrambled back into our tank,”
Livesey said, “and scanned ahead into the grove of trees, using our gun sight
and binoculars to spot a building with some Japs moving around inside it. We
opened fire with everything we had.”

Their 75 mm main gun was loaded with high-explosive and
incendiary rounds. Several hits produced larger explosions followed climactic ally
by a mushrooming fireball that marked the demise of a Japanese fuel dump.
Livesey ordered his driver forward and shot up the area for effect. About a
hundred yards on, he came upon a clearing and stopped again, breaking out water
for his crew. As Dickens’s amtank rolled up alongside, Livesey and his men
dismounted to talk with them. No other Marines had yet made it that far inland.
“We were alone and isolated,” Livesey said, “but enjoying our success.” They
were picking through the wooden crates that constituted their magazines,
counting their remaining shells, when, down the road, four behemoths of foreign
origin loomed into view.

The Japanese medium tanks were in a single column, moving
toward the landing beach. They did not seem to see the Americans hustling to
remount. Once buttoned in, Livesey and Dickens turned out after them,
unlimbering their 75 mm guns and opening fire. His ammunition passers were
scrambling to find armor-piercing shells when the enemy column turned and came
directly at the Marines. “It was us or them,” Livesey said.

Neither side’s vehicle was a match for the other’s main gun.
Livesey’s vehicle shook from a hit to its engine compartment, but June 15 was
his day; the shell was a dud. Gales of machine gun fire washed over them.
Though the 75s liked to jam and did, the gunners and loaders kept their breech
blocks smoking, and Marine Corps marksmanship was equal to the moment.
Destroying three of the enemy tanks in succession, they stopped the Japanese
armor just fifty to seventy yards away. Livesey watched one of the enemy
tankers pile out of his hatch and start running for the hills, a good thing
given that Livesey’s ammunition passers were nearly down to smoke shells. He
threw a few rounds after the enemy squirter, but as artillery and mortars in
the hills began bracketing them again, he and Dickens and their crews opted to
bail out. As they set out on foot to the beach, mortar shrapnel killed one of
Dickens’s men, Private Leo Pletcher. The freelancing foray by Livesey and
Dickens would earn each of them a Navy Cross. More important, it relieved
pressure on the vulnerable Second Marine Division foothold by blunting an
armored assault that might have fallen upon the beach.

The fighting on the left flank continued stiff and sharp.
The Sixth Marines were able to force a shallow beachhead no more than a hundred
yards deep, as far as the coastal road behind Red Beach. But pillboxes and
machine gun positions checked their progress. An enemy tank on the beach that everyone
had thought was disabled opened fire with its 37 mm gun on the LVTs that were
bringing in the Sixth Marines’ reserve unit, the First Battalion, under
Lieutenant Colonel William K. Jones. One of the vehicles that got hit was
carrying the staff of Jones’s boss, the regimental commander, Colonel James P.
Riseley. Many of them were badly wounded. Soon after landing, Riseley learned
that the commander of his Third Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel John W. Easley,
had been hit, too.

As Riseley was setting up his regimental command post near
the center of Red Beach Two, as many as two dozen Japanese troops charged down
the beach from the north. They reached the rear area of the regiment’s Second
Battalion, where wounded Americans were laid out in stretchers under tents near
the beach. The Marines rallied, established a firing line, and annihilated the
Japanese force. But the close-run assault proved that no one was safe in a
battle of infiltration. On the day, the commanders of all four of the Second
Marine Division’s assault battalions were wounded in action: Raymond L. Murray
of the 2/6 (hit along with his executive officer), Henry P. Crowe of the 2/8,
John C. Miller of the 3/8, and Easley of the 3/6. After nightfall, the task of
closing the gaps in their lines would be a matter of life and death.

To break the pressure of the counterattack, Riseley ordered
the First Battalion to pass through the Third Battalion area and renew the push
toward the O-1 line. Riseley would have given the job to no one other than the
1/6’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jones. He would call him “the best damn
battalion commander in this division, or any other division.” At the moment,
Jones was the only officer of his rank physically able to lead an assault on
that high ground. The 1/6 had taken a hundred casualties on the way to the
beach. Coming ashore, the survivors had replaced their soaked equipment and
gear by harvesting from those who had fallen ahead of them. Jones rallied them
forward.

With units scattered and intermingled thanks to the
whirligig movements of amtracs in surf and tide, and with the heavy fire urging
survival ahead of record keeping, it was difficult to count the wounded. The
first casualties were brought to the beach for loading onto LVTs at about
10:40. The total number of killed and wounded that day would total more than
two thousand, most of the casualties inflicted by artillery and mortar fire.
But an untold multitude emblematized by Lieutenant Colonel Easley refused to
report to triage for fear of being removed from the company of their men at the
front.