Strong Men Armed

“Do you think the Japs will turn and run?”

“No,” Spruance said. “Not now. They’re out after big game. If they’d wanted something easy, they’d have gone after MacArthur’s operation at Biak. But the attack on the Marianas is too great a challenge for the Japanese Navy to ignore.”

That attack was going forward with the Second Battalion, Eighth, and the orphan First Battalion, Twenty- ninth Marines, slugging steadily through the Afetna Point pocket. By noon they had cleared it and secured Charan Kanoa pier.

On the right, the Fourth Division’s artillery fired shell for shell with the Japanese while General Schmidt marshaled his regiments for a noon attack. With 15 batteries of the Fourteenth Marines ashore, it should have been the pushover that artillery duels with the Japanese had always been. But it was not. Four batteries were knocked out, although the ingenuity of the Division Ordnance Company had them back firing before dusk. One howitzer named Belching Beauty took a direct hit which killed or wounded every member of the crew but one. Belching Beauty was repaired and firing an hour later. Two others were blown to bits, and the ordnance man gathered up the pieces and made a new gun from them.

Gradually, the Marine artillery asserted its superiority. One by one, the enemy guns were silenced, the last of their rounds killing Lieutenant Colonel Maynard Schultz while he waited at the Twenty-fourth Regiment’s CP to receive instructions for his First Battalion’s attack.

At half-past twelve the Fourth Division moved out. It slugged ahead slowly. The battalion commanders began calling for tanks. As the Shermans moved up to the front, the Japanese 75’s erupted again.

The platoon of Shermans led by Gunnery Sergeant Bob McCard ran into the concentrated fire of an entire battery of 75’s. Almost instantly, McCard’s tank was cut off from the others and crippled by the converging shells of four enemy guns. McCard battled back with the tank’s 75 and machine guns. But the Japanese 75’s had the range now. The Sherman was done for.

“Take off!” McCard roared at his crew. “Out the escape hatch!”

One by one, the crewmen lowered themselves through the hatch in the tank’s floor, scuttling to safety while McCard hurled grenades from the opened turret. Machine-gun fire raked the tank, wounding McCard. The Japanese charged. McCard seized a machine gun and faced them a second time alone. He shot 16 of them before they killed him.

The other Marine tanks returned. The stand which won McCard the Medal of Honor had also won the time to coordinate the attack. It went forward, slowly, but by dusk the Marines’ lines were firm all along the beachhead. The Fourth Division had a penetration of 2,000 yards across its 4,000-yard front. The Second Division had contented itself with cleaning out the Afetna Point gap, with patrolling, and with consolidating its own left flank facing north toward Garapan. It was well. At dusk, while the 27th Division’s 165th Infantry began to come ashore, Lieutenant General Saito ordered the first night tank attack of the Pacific War.

It would strike the left flank sector held by the Jones boy named Bill.

“He may be only twenty-seven, but he’s the best damn battalion commander in this division-or any other division.”

That was what Colonel Jim Riseley of the Sixth Marines thought of the commander of his First Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Jones, the Marine Corps’ youngest field commander and one so at home in battle he could tell his men, “I’d rather command a battalion in combat than sleep with Hedy Lamarr.” Jones was the brother of Captain Jim Jones, whose Recon Boys were then assigned the unglorious mission of guarding the Corps CP in the rear, and he delighted in warning his officers that they must stand at all costs, “because if my brother gets hurt, Mother will never forgive me.” This night of June 16-17 they would have to stand against the full brunt of Colonel Hideki Goto’s 9th Tank Regiment.

Up in the blackened rubble that was once the city of Garapan, Colonel Goto unbuttoned the turret of his regiment’s leading tank. He stood erect. He raised his saber and flourished it over his head. The turrets of the following tanks came open. The commanders, among them that Tokuzo Matsuya who had written so fiercely in his diary two days before, stood erect. They flourished their sabers.

Colonel Goto struck the side of his tank a resounding clank. His junior officers spurred their metal-mounts forward with similar saber-slaps. The turrets were closed.

The 9th Tank Regiment swept forward.

“Colonel,” said Captain Claude Rollen, “it sounds like a tank attack coming. Request illumination.”

“Right,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jones, and passed the request for illumination back to Colonel Riseley. Then he notified a medium tank company to stand by and got bazookamen from A Company moving over to Captain Rollen’s sector.

That was at half-past three.

Fifteen minutes later the squeaking, rattling Japanese mediums—the “kitchen sinks” as the Marines called them-burst into Rollen’s sector in two waves.

The first wave carried riflemen or light machine-gunners sprawled on the long trunk of the engine compartment or hanging on to the guide rails like firemen. Crewmen led the tanks forward on foot, although here and there a commander stood erect in an open turret, shouting orders and flashing his saber in the crashing glare of the star-shells. Behind the second wave of tanks the bulk of Colonel Ogawa’s 136th Infantry Regiment came trotting forward.

The tanks drove into a roaring cauldron of explosions and flashing light. As they were hit and set afire they illuminated other tanks farther back. Sometimes the tanks to the rear stopped. An officer jumped out, waved his saber, made a speech, and climbed back in again. A bugle blared. The tanks came on and the Marine bazookamen tore them apart. Sharp-shooters such as Pfc. Herbert Hodges had seven rockets for his bazooka, enough for him to knock out seven tanks. Private Bob Reed got four with four shots, and then, running out of ammunition, he got a fifth by jumping aboard it and dropping in a grenade.

Some of the enemy tanks got in. Two of them rolled over a pair of 60-millimeter mortar positions. Another came up on Captain Rollen, and a rifleman-rider fired just as Rollen attached a grenade to his carbine. The bullet detonated the grenade-and Rollen fell, pinked with shrapnel, his eardrums shattered.

Captain Thomas came up to take his place, the same Norman Thomas who had held off the Jap banzai on Tarawa. A fourth tank raced up. Its riders shot Thomas dead. They turned to take Sergeant Dean Squires under fire.

But Squires had already blown off the head of the tank’s commander. He followed through by tossing a satchel charge in the open turret, finishing both tank and riders.

A fifth Japanese tank penetrated as far back as Colonel Riseley’s command post. The commander of the Sixth Regiment had been sitting on a tree stump, smoking a cigar while he watched the battle.

The tank rattled closer. Colonel Riseley removed his cigar.

“Son,” he called to his regimental clerk, “get me a bazooka.”

Before the man could obey, a Marine half-track clattered up on the tank and set it aflame with its first shell. Thereafter the half-tracks roved like wolves among the Japanese tanks. Each time they fired, a tank burned—until close to 30 had been knocked out. The others fled, and the last of these was sighted going up a distant hill. Its turret could be seen moving among a cluster of houses. The Marines gave the range to an offshore destroyer.

The destroyer fired 20 salvos and the tank burned for the rest of the day—sending up a cloud of oily smoke to mark the limit of the battleground where General Saito had lost another 700 foot soldiers as well as Colonel Goto and most of the 9th Tank Regiment he commanded.

Tokuzo Matsuya had not been killed. He had survived to fill his diary with another lament: “The remaining tanks in our regiment make a total of 12. Even if there are not tanks, we will fight hand to hand. I have resolved that, if I see the enemy, I will take out my sword and slash, slash, slash at him as long as I last, thus ending my life of twenty-four years.”

It was no boast but a prediction, and by the morning of the third day there were already 3,500 Marine casualties to give it force. June 17 brought more than 500 more casualties in a slow, gouging attack which extended the beachhead north about a thousand yards and up to 2,000 yards east or inland. The inland successes, however, also served to lengthen the Lake Susupe bulge between divisions. The Japanese had hidden in Susupe’s marshes,