Strong Men Armed

his head and sent his helmet clanging against the rocks. Blood spattered on a nearby sergeant.

“Goddam it, Mac!” the sergeant roared to everyone with hearing. “Let’s go up and get those bastards!”

They went up, hanging onto stone knobs with one hand, hurling grenades with the other-sometimes shot from their holds and dropped to the boulders below-but going up, up and over, cleaning out the caves and taking Sugar Loaf Hill.

Then they descended on Garapan to the west. They fought into Royal Palm Park and gaped at the 40-foot stone shaft supporting the figure of a Japanese statesman. He wore western dress. He was 10 feet tall.

“Hell’s fire!” a Marine swore with fervent irreverence. “This must be the guy that told ‘em they was bullet- proof!”

The conquerors of Tapotchau and The Pimples were coming down from the mountains. Their faces were smeared with dirt and grimy with beard stubble. Their dungarees were stiff with sweat and dried earth. Their hands were black. They were walking as wooden men with leaden feet. But now, those dull sunken eyes were beginning to gleam. For they had seen the blue beckoning water of Tanapag Harbor, and the tanks had begun to lead them down the last hills to the canefields below.

And there were the Japanese-running.

They were being flushed from their foxholes by the roaring 75’s of the Shermans. They were in full view, and the Marines were rushing down the hill, dropping to their knees, firing, jumping up and running forward to fire again, their gaunt faces suddenly alive with victory, their eyes glittering with a fierce joy.

They came down the hill and swept through the canebrake and halted a few hundred yards short of the harbor, while to their left rear the Marines in Garapan began attacking up to them.

“Slaughterhouse is back!” a Marine sergeant in Garapan yelled, and the men of the Third Battalion, Second, understood him to mean that Lieutenant Colonel Arnold Johnston had returned to command them. Johnston had brought the battalion into Saipan, had been wounded twice and then evacuated. But now, on the morning of July 3, he had rejoined the outfit and taken over from Major Throneson.

“Crazy Gyrene bastard!” the sergeant swore. “He’s dead but he won’t lie down. He’s back there stompin’ around on one gimp leg and a Jap cane.”

He was, and Lieutenant Colonel John Easley had also come back for the attack to the harbor. He had been wounded on D-Day while leading the Third Battalion, Sixth, ashore. There were many men in the ranks like Johnston and Easley fighting up to Tanapag with bandaged bodies, helping to overrun the few snipers standing between themselves and the big seaplane base the Japanese had built there.

They reached it just before dusk. It was deserted. There were only the darkening burned-out bulks of eight Kawanishi four-engined bombers. There was only silence and offshore the black silhouettes of the transports they had not seen since June 15.

The Marines waded out into the harbor and bathed their faces.

“Son of a bitch!” one of them exclaimed. “If tomorrow ain’t the Fourth of July!”

7

There was no longer any hope for either Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito or Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo or the men they commanded. Their food and ammunition were spent-as were their bodies-and by July 5 they held only the northern third of Saipan. The airfield which Saito and Nagumo had ordered completed at Marpi Point was now a shambles.

“General Saito is not going to get away in an airplane if we can help it,” said Howlin’ Mad Smith on July 5, and the American artillery wrecked the little field. Shelling also had destroyed communications between Nagumo and Saito, and yet, on July 6, these separated commanders had come to the same conclusion: it was now time for the samurai or nobleman to make the final gesture.

In the early morning of that date, tired old General Saito gathered his staff in his cave. He was a pathetic figure. His beard was long and matted. His clothing was stained. All of his strength had deserted him and to sustain him he had only the last resource of that deep Oriental despair which is the other side of the coin of pride.

“I am addressing the officers and men of the Imperial Army on Saipan,” he wrote in his final message.

For more than twenty days since the American Devils attacked, the officers, men and civilian employees of the Imperial Army and Navy on this island have fought well and bravely. Everywhere they have demonstrated the honor and glory of the Imperial Force. I expected that every man would do his duty.

Heaven has not given us an opportunity. We have not been able to utilize fully the terrain. We have fought in unison up to the present time but now we have no materials with which to fight and our artillery for attack has been completely destroyed. Our comrades have fallen one after another. Despite the bitterness of defeat, we pledge, “Seven lives to repay our country!”

The barbarous attack of the enemy is being continued. Even though the enemy has occupied only a corner of Saipan, we are dying without avail under the violent shelling and bombing. Whether we attack or whether we stay where we are, there is only death. However, in death there is life. We must utilize this opportunity to exalt true Japanese manhood. I will advance with those who remain to deliver still another blow to the American Devils, and leave my bones on Saipan as a bulwark of the Pacific.

As it says in Battle Ethics, I will never suffer the disgrace of being taken alive, and I will offer up the courage of my soul and calmly rejoice in living by the eternal principle.

Here I pray with you for the eternal life of the Emperor and the welfare of our country and I advance to seek out the enemy.

Follow me!

But if those valiant, suffering Japanese foot-soldiers had indeed followed General Saito there would have been no banzai.

For the aged commander of Saipan sat down to a farewell feast of canned crabmeat and saki. At ten o’clock he had finished. He arose and said:

“It makes no difference whether I die today or tomorrow, so I will die first. I will meet my staff at Yasakuni Shrine.”

He walked slowly to a flat rock. He cleaned it off and sat down. He faced the misty East and bowed gravely. He raised his glittering samurai saber in salute and cried, “Tenno Heika! Banzai!” He pressed the point of his blade into his breast and the moment he had drawn blood his adjutant shot him in the head.

In another cave on Saipan at about the same time, Nagumo of Pearl Harbor sent a bullet crashing into his brain by his own hand.

Tonight the Japanese would follow their leaders’ orders, without their leaders.

On that same July 6 Holland Smith visited 27th Infantry Division headquarters and warned Major General Griner that a banzai would probably come against his men that night or early the next morning.

Smith had long anticipated a strong enemy counterstroke south along the coastal flat on the island’s western shore. It was for this reason that he had kept his left or northern flank strong during seizure of the beachhead, and the fact that all the strong Japanese counterblows had been made there had confirmed his judgment. For this reason also he had ordered Major General Watson to keep the Second Marine Division’s west flank strong during the attack north.

But now the 27th Infantry Division had taken over the entire west or left flank, for on July 5, as his attack began moving on a front narrowing away to the northeast, Smith had reduced his commitment to two divisions. The Second Marine Division went into reserve, and the alignment became 27th on the left or west and Fourth Marine Division on the right or east. In the 27th’s sector was Tanapag Plain, about three miles northeast of Garapan.