Back on the beaches the accuracy of Japanese artillery fire was crowding medical aid stations with casualties. Never before had the Marines encountered such deadly artillery fire, and with about 8,000 men put ashore by nine o’clock in the morning, there was a plenitude of targets for the enemy gunners.
Within the Fourth Division’s zone, men dug foxholes to shelter the wounded. One man was brought in with his leg almost blown off between hip and knee. A battalion surgeon amputated it without bothering to remove him from his stretcher. Two more stretcher cases came in, one a private, the other an old-time sergeant. The private said he had to relieve himself. A corpsman seized the sergeant’s helmet and handed it to the private. It was the ultimate violation of authority and the sergeant watched in helpless fury, raging:
“That I should live to see the day when a private should do that in my helmet!”
They were taken, both violated and violator, out to the reef and there transferred to landing boats. From there they went to hospital transports already stuffed with wounded and preparing to pull up anchors and sail away. By nightfall the Second Division alone had 238 men killed and 1,022 wounded -and of 355 reported missing few would be found alive. The Fourth Division, though not so badly hit, had already exceeded its casualty rate for the Roi-Namur campaign.
But by nightfall there were something like 20,000 Marines ashore on Saipan. They held a beachhead about four miles wide from its northern down to its southern flank and a mile at its deepest inland or eastern penetration. Within the perimeter, which had both flanks bent back to the sea, were tanks and artillery, as well as Generals Watson and Schmidt, both of whom came ashore in the afternoon.
However, neither division had reached its first day’s objective. The Afetna Point pocket still stood between both divisions at the sea, and there was another bulge inland in the unconquered Lake Susupe region.
Among the men, the veterans had ceased comparing Saipan to other battles and were rating it on its own merits. It was clear that Saipan was going to be a thing of dirt and strain, of heat and thirst, of clouds of flies, of clanging steel and splintering rock. It would be a point-by-point advance against an invisible, dogged, slowly retreating enemy—a foe who had already mystified them by whisking away his dead.
So they lay down that night in the ruins of the sugar refinery with which the fast battleships had had such aimless sport-failing even to kill its single occupant, that valorous Japanese soldier who hid in its chimney to call down artillery on the enemy Marines-or they lay down in the muck and stench of pigpens and chicken runs, on the hot smoldering earth of the blackened canebrakes, under the guns of Mount Fina Susa, and beneath the bursting, crashing glare of their own star-shells, illumination so brilliant that it seemed to make the bougainvillaea trees things of airy flame.
Opposite them the enemy was stirring. The counterattack was preparing. The men of Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito were in high spirits. For everyone in the Marianas seemed to know that the Combined Fleet was coming to the rescue. Admiral Nagumo had told General Saito so. As far away as Guam, Lieutenant Rai Imanishi was writing in his diary: “The Combined Fleet is about to engage the enemy in decisive combat…. The enemy has already begun landing on Saipan. Truly, we are on the threshold of momentous occurrences. Now is the time for me to offer my life for the great cause and be a barrier against the enemy advancing in the Pacific Ocean.”
Although he would have to wait a month or more for his chance on Guam, Lieutenant Imanishi was right. The Combined Fleet was indeed coming. Admiral Soemu Toyoda had bitten hard on the Saipan bait.
3
On the morning of June 15 the word of the Saipan invasion was flashed by Nagumo to Admiral Toyoda at his headquarters on Japan’s Inland Sea. At five minutes to nine that morning, Admiral Toyoda sent this message to all his commanders:
The Combined Fleet will attack the enemy in the Marianas area and annihilate the invasion force.
Five minutes later, suddenly mindful that it was close to the thirty-ninth anniversary of Admiral Togo’s destruction of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, Toyoda bethought himself of the immortal Togo’s words on that occasion and flashed them to the Combined Fleet:
The fate of the Empire rests on this one battle. Every man is expected to do his utmost.
It was, to the Japanese mind, the tocsin of total battle. It brought the carriers of Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa up from Tawi Tawi to the narrow waters of San Bernardino Strait, bound for their Philippine Sea rendezvous with a battleship force led by Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki. It brought the Japanese fleet out fighting for the first time since Guadalcanal.
Exhilarated by the great news, the Japanese on Saipan attacked all along the line. From dark until dawn there was hardly a moment when enemy shells were not falling on the Marines or the enemy was not probing for the weak spot against which he would launch his full fury. At about eight o’clock on the night of June 15, the Japanese thought they had found a hole on the front held by the command-riddled Second Battalion, Sixth.
At that time, the Japanese began moving down the coastal road from Garapan. They came in columns of platoons, riding tanks, trucks, anything that rolled-coming with the customary clamor of a traveling circus. At ten o’clock they were close enough to attack. Flags were unfurled. Samurai sabers flashed and glinted in the moonlight. Someone made a speech. A bugle blared—and the Japanese charged.
A Marine officer picked up a telephone and spoke two words:
“Illumination requested.”
It came so swiftly it stunned the Japanese. They had not calculated on the American warships still cruising up and down the west coast. They found themselves outlined from their puttee-taped ankles to the round tops of their mushroom helmets, and they were rapidly cut to pieces in a horizontal hail of bullets, cannister shot, mortar and bazooka shell fragments. They broke and fell back, and then the naval gunfire and Marine artillery burst among them.
The counterattack downroad from Garapan cost General Saito 700 soldiers. It also cost him Garapan, for in the morning General Watson asked the warships and planes to flatten this enemy staging place.
General Saito’s plans for driving a wedge into the gap between the Marine divisions was also doomed. Some 200 Japanese who emerged from the gloom of Lake Susupe and struck for the Charan Kanoa pier collided with the men of Lieutenant Colonel John Cosgrove’s Third Battalion, Twenty-third. They were destroyed. So also was a three-tank attack launched down the Garapan road just before daylight. June 16 dawned with the Marines still holding what they had seized the day before and preparing to expand it. That same day Admiral Spruance hauled back on the line holding the Saipan bait.
Spruance knew that Ozawa had sortied from Tawi Tawi. Throughout the afternoon and night of D-Day he had been receiving submarine reports of the Japanese approach. At half-past four the sub
On the morning of June 16, Spruance conferred with Admiral Turner and General Holland Smith aboard Turner’s flagship Rocky Mount. He ordered Mitscher’s Task Force 58 to intercept the Japanese, postponed the Guam invasion, promised Smith only two more days of unloading operations, launched prolonged air searches for the enemy, and alerted the old battleships to make nocturnal patrols 25 miles west of Saipan to block any Japanese ships which might elude Mitscher.
In the meantime the escort carriers would continue to give the Marines on Saipan aerial cover and Smith would commit the 27th Division that very day. The conquest of the island was to be pushed forward as rapidly as possible.
Satisfied, Spruance prepared to return to his own flagship
