characteristic of all bombardiers or artillerists captivated by the sound and fury of their cannonading.
“Keep coming, Marines!” he signaled. “They’re going to run away!”
2
Saipan burned fitfully beneath a drifting pall of smoke, and yet, she did not seem menacing. She was, along with Tinian, absolutely ringed round by American warships. They sailed back and forth, firing, and some of them lay in the strait between Saipan and Tinian to hurl broadsides at Saipan’s southern tip. Others in the strait fired along the beaches which would shortly be swarming with American Marines.
Yet, Saipan was silent, almost dreamlike. The western beaches were quiet. The peak of 1,554-foot Mount Tapotchau seemed to float on a sea of smoke in the middle of the island. Behind the landing beaches, in their center, the ruined village of Charan Kanoa smoldered, and the blackened smokestack of a wrecked sugar mill seemed to cleave the air like a marker dividing the front. Far to the left, upcoast, lay the city of Garapan, marked only by an occasional ray of sunshine glinting off roofs of corrugated iron.
Above Garapan the Marines of the diversionary force had boarded their landing boats. They were roaring inshore, naval gunfire breathing heavily overhead. They were drawing off a regiment of General Saito’s force—but no more. The aged defender of Saipan had guessed that the true effort was coming at Charan Kanoa’s beaches, and he had prepared his artillery for it. His guns were emplaced behind Mount Fina Susa, the ridge overlooking Charan Kanoa. They were firing with skill, for they had the water between beaches and reef thoroughly registered, and they had sown it with little colored flags to mark the range.
Counterbattery shells screamed seaward. Tennessee was hit. Shells burst on the decks of the cruiser
Halfway inside the 1,500-yard run to the beach the amtracks began to take hits. Officers and men could almost guess the caliber of the next enemy barrage by the color of the flags they passed.
On the right sector attacked by the Fourth Marine Division, riflemen were vaulting from the amtracks and running in low toward Charan Kanoa. Shells were exploding among them. Some of the combat teams remained aboard their amtracks, fighting from them as they swayed inland. But the amtracks were targets for the enemy artillery, as were the amtanks, and soon the Marines preferred to advance on foot toward Charan Kanoa.
On their right, at the southernmost beaches, the assault of the Twenty-fifth Marines had split up into squad- to-squad battles. Lieutenant Fred Harvey led his platoon up the beach. A Japanese officer rushed him, swinging his saber. Harvey parried with his carbine, jumped back and shot his assailant dead. A Marine fell and Harvey seized the man’s M-1. With other Marines he closed on three Japanese in a shellhole. Harvey’s M-1 jammed. He drove in slashing with the bayonet. A grenade landed. Harvey hit the deck, the explosion picked him up and slammed him down again. He arose helmetless to help finish off the enemy.
So the battle raged, moving steadily inland through the wrecked village, moving over gently rising hills made labyrinthine by hidden caves, spider holes and interconnected dug-outs. The Marines and Japanese fought each other among bleating goats, lowing oxen, mooing cows and scampering, clucking chickens. Soon the Japanese soldiers began to fall back behind Mount Fina Susa, and then their artillery fire increased.
On the left the Second Marine Division passed through a rhythmical, flashing hell of artillery and mortars. Every 25 yards, every fifteen seconds of their ride to the beaches, a shell exploded among the amtracks. On Afetna Point in the center of the landing beaches an antiboat gun began clanging. Shore batteries opened up again. Close- in destroyers roared back at them, silencing them. But there were amtracks smoking and burning, there were bloody Marines writhing on their twisted decks. And the antiboat gun was driving the amtracks farther and farther north, forcing some of the battalions to land on the wrong beaches.
Within a few minutes of the arrival of the Marines on the leftward beaches, every one of the commanders of the four assault battalions had become a casualty. Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Murray of the Second Battalion, Sixth, was so seriously wounded he had to be evacuated. Jim Crowe was also badly hit.
The big flamboyant redhead, now a lieutenant colonel, became separated from his men as his Second Battalion, Eighth landed by mistake on another battalion’s beach. At half-past nine he moved along the shore with his runner, Corporal William Donitaley. They were fired at by enemy snipers.
Crowe slumped to the earth struck by a bullet which pierced his left lung below the heart and smashed a rib as it came out. Donitaley fell thrashing in a bush, his left side punctured near the kidney. He thought he was dying.
“I’m hit pretty bad, sir,” Donitaley gasped. “I guess I’m a goner.”
“Goddam it,” Crowe spluttered. “Don’t talk like that, boy.” The act of speaking had caused hot air to puff from Crowe’s punctured lung, and he felt blood continuing to gush from his side. Jim Crowe also thought he was a goner.
“I guess they got me too, boy,” he choked.
“Goddam it, sir,” said Donitaley. “Don’t talk like that.”
They lay in the bushes, aware of the grim comedy of their exchange, their wounds multiplying under showers of shrapnel thrown down by Japanese artillery treebursts, until they were found nearly an hour later and brought back to an aid station. A corpsman and Doctor Otto Jantan attempted to fix them up, but Japanese shellfire killed the corpsman and wounded the doctor. Crowe was taken out to a transport, where a young surgeon began to cut away his blood-stained clothing.
“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.
