after the Navy flier who was killed in preinvasion attacks on it-and they were hauling supplies from the Charan Kanoa beachhead about three miles to the northwest by means of a narrow-gauge railway formerly employed in the Charan Kanoa sugar industry. Isely Field was fit to receive squadrons of Army P-47 Thunderbolts assigned to Saipan combat patrol and scheduled to arrive the following day. Out on the bay the battleship
The next day, June 23, the three-division attack to the north planned by Howlin’ Mad Smith at last got going. The 27th Division-less its 105th Infantry still south at Nafutan Point —went into the line between the Second Marine Division on the left and the Fourth on the right.
The Fourth again made good gains, although the attack was still a matter of climbing another mountain to behold another mountain. The division’s chief objective this day was Hill 600, guarding the entrance to Kagman Peninsula, which stretched east into Magicienne Bay for about three miles. The Marines of the Fourth took Hill 600 and renamed it Hot Potato Hill for the fierce hand-grenade fight which won it. Then they swerved right or east to bite deep into Kagman Peninsula. They could have gone farther, but the 27th Division in the center was unable to move because of resistance met in a crackling lowland called Death Valley. The Fourth halted and dug in, for the lag in the center had exposed its left.
On the left of the three-division front the Second Division’s Marines began struggling up the cruel steeps of Mount Tapotchau-blundering through a jumble of limestone crags, lava heads and coral ridges, gullies, gulches and ravines, all piled one upon another as though kicked together, all exposed to the direct rays of a hot sun. All around Tapotchau were caves and subterranean forts from which Japanese artillery had attempted to destroy the Marines on the beaches. The short tan men of Nippon were still fighting from these, at closer, more accurate range now, and still invisibly.
Against them, against the slashing madness of Tapotchau itself, came the Sixth and Eighth Marine Regiments. They came without tanks, jeeps or bulldozers-for there was not even so much as a trail up the mountainside. They came warily, sending out probing patrols, waiting for the sound of firing which would signal that the patrol had found the enemy, and then going forward on foot, climbing.
But they advanced. And then, finding their right flank exposed by the 27th’s failure to make any appreciable gains, they too halted and dug in.
In the morning both the Second and the Fourth Marine Divisions moved out. But the 27th in the center was again slow, again unable to get through Death Valley. For the second straight day the attack was slowed down, and Lieutenant General Holland Smith relieved Major General Ralph Smith of his command of the 27th Division. The Army’s Major General Sanderford Jarman, who was to have been Saipan’s military governor, took Ralph Smith’s place. The pace of the attack began to quicken, but by nightfall there were still long vertical gaps between the Marine divisions ahead on the flanks and the 27th behind them in the center.
That night the Japanese counterattacked the Second Division’s front in the Tapotchau hills, coming in greatest strength against a machine-gun post held by Pfc. Harold Epperson with Corporal Malcom Jonah and Pfc. Edward Bailey. It was very dark. The Marines could barely make out the bulk of a dense wood about 50 yards away.
It was out of the wood that the Japanese came, running straight at Epperson’s pit. The young gunner opened fire. The short shapes began to fall. One of them seemed to crumple right under the muzzle of the gun. Epperson fired on. Suddenly the figure under the gun came alive. The Japanese jumped up. He tossed a grenade into the pit.
Pfc. Epperson threw himself on it and was killed.
He had saved the lives of his comrades and they were able to fight on and break up the attack—and he had won a posthumous Medal of Honor.
The following day-June 25—Mount Tapotchau’s peak was placed under direct assault.
Since June 22 the orphan First Battalion, Twenty-ninth, had been driving up a jumbled valley which ran between two ridges to Tapotchau’s crest. They had fought forward under Lieutenant Colonel Rathvon (Tommy) Tompkins, who had taken over after Lieutenant Colonel Guy Tannyhill had been wounded. They had been joined by the Second Battalion, Eighth, led by Jim Crowe’s executive, Major Chamberlin.
On June 25, Chamberlin and Tompkins conferred with Colonel Clarence Wallace, commander of the Eighth, and got up a plan to take Tapotchau.
While Tompkins’ men went up the valley, Chamberlin’s battalion was to attack along the ridge, where the bulk of enemy opposition could be expected.
But it was the valley that was nastiest. Tompkins’ men ran into rough terrain and a stubborn enemy, while Chamberlin’s Marines were moving swiftly along the heights, advancing as far as a 50-foot cliff which crowned Tapotchau like a top hat. Chamberlin sent a patrol up the cliff. The men returned with the report that the crest of Tapotchau seemed unoccupied.
The patrol’s return coincided with the arrival of Tommy Tompkins from the valley below. He brought with him a platoon from the Division Scout Company, for he had become convinced that a frontal attack up the mountain was impossible. He took the Scouts up the steep side of Tapotchau’s top hat. They were all but exhausted by the rigor of that climb, but at eleven o’clock in the morning there was no longer anything above them.
They broke into the clear, into the open where their helmets touched the sky, and all around them rolled the vast smoking, glinting, glittering, moving panorama of an ocean island under assault from the sea. They stood at almost the exact center of Saipan, with the northern extremity of Marpi Point on the west coast seven miles in front of them and the southern tip of Nafutan Point slanting the same distance to the rear on the east coast.
Tompkins ordered the Scouts to hold the crest while he returned to the valley to get his battalion. They occupied a 12-foot-square dugout abandoned by the enemy during the day’s shelling. They fought from it to hold off repeated Japanese thrusts at them, while all around Tapotchau the ridges shook to furious Marine onslaught calculated to pin the Japanese main body down while Tompkins’ men came up from the valley single-file.
At dusk, Tompkins and his men clawed their way up to the crest-where the Scouts had killed 40 Japanese while losing three of their own men. They, too, dug in. They hurled back the inevitable nocturnal counterattack, holding Tapotchau even as destroyers and rocket boats offshore shattered an attempt to reinforce southern Saipan by barge.
On the same night, Lieutenant General Saito began to tell Tokyo the truth about what was happening on his island. He signaled the chief of staff in Tokyo:
Please apologize deeply to the Emperor that we cannot do better than we are doing. However, because of the units sunk at sea, the various forces have no fighting strength, although they do have large numbers.
There is no hope for victory in places where we do not have control of the air and we are still hoping here for aerial reinforcements.
Praying for the good health of the Emperor, we all cry, “Banzai!”
The aerial reinforcements for which Saito still hoped would never come. Only the day before, Vice Admiral Joseph (Jocko) Clark’s carrier force had raided Iwo Jima and destroyed 95 fighters and bombers at a loss of six Hellcats. On the very day of Tapotchau’s fall, June 25, another American carrier force struck hard at air bases on Guam and Rota.
There was nothing for this ailing and aged commander to do but to retreat north and await the end made so clearly inevitable to him by the constant presence of those circling, booming American warships.
5
The Japanese cornered on Nafutan Point were preparing to break out of the trap.
Since the capture of Isely Field on June 18, these 600 soldiers of the 47th Brigade’s 317th Infantry Battalion had been holed up on their stern-browed peninsula-endlessly pounded by offshore American warships or battered by artillery supporting the American 105th Infantry blocking their escape route north. On the night of June 26, having
