It was because Tanapag Plain was a lowland made for counterattack, as well as because the hemmed-in enemy could be expected to make his unfailing reaction to such predicament, that Smith came to Griner to warn him of impending banzai. He also cautioned him to be sure his battalions were tied tightly to each other’s flanks.
But as night fell on July 6 the 105th Infantry Regiment which held the Tanapag Plain had not buttoned up its front. Its left-to-right alignment by battalions was 2nd, ist and 3rd —the last tying in with the 165th Infantry on high ground to the right or east of Tanapag Plain.
Between the 1st Battalion in the center and the 3rd on the right was a gap of 300 yards-and north of it the Japanese had begun to mass.
The Japanese were singing as they massed, singing
Down the coastal plain they swept. They rolled like a cattle stampede against the lines of the 2nd and ist Battalions, 105th, and they cut them off and overwhelmed them. They found the gap between the ist and 3rd Battalions, 105th, and thundered through it.
Army artillery pounded them, Marine guns bayed—but still they swept over those army battalions, for there were so many of them. They had come determined to die and they made the American soldiers fight for their lives. Some soldiers shot so many Japanese that bodies clogged their fields of fire and they had to move their guns. Others shot themselves out of ammunition and fought with their hands. The 105th’s left and center was cut up into pocket after pocket. Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien of the First Battalion tried to rally his men and was killed firing a heavy machine gun from a jeep. Sergeant Tom Baker of the same outfit was wounded and refused to leave the lines when his unit withdrew. He asked to be propped up against a tree. He was. By morning he was dead, but there were eight lifeless Japanese around him, and he was awarded a Medal of Honor along with O’Brien. Throughout the morning the fighting swirled within and around the lines of these two battalions. Their remnants were forced to form a hasty perimeter on the water’s edge. They were driven into the sea, by their own artillery as much as by enemy fire, and had to be rescued by small boats. In all, the ist and 2nd Battalions, 105th, suffered a total of 668 casualties.
Meanwhile, the Japanese who had shot the gap during the night burst in a howling flood on the startled gunners of the Third Battalion, Tenth Marines. The gunners lowered their 105’s to point-blank range. They cut their fuses to 150 yards, to 100 yards. But still the enemy charged. The gunners disarmed their howitzers and fell back into a covered-wagon defense. They too fought on through the morning, helped by men from brother artillery battalions-Marines such as Pfc. Harold Agerholm, who singlehandedly evacuated 45 wounded men until he fell from the wound that would make his Medal of Honor posthumous-and then the turrets of the 106th Infantry’s counterattacking tanks came into view.
Then also on this morning of July 7 the Japanese hospitals disgorged and the
They came down the plain hobbling and limping, amputees, men on crutches, walking wounded supporting one another, men in bandages. Some had weapons, most brandished idiot sticks or swung bayonets, others were barehanded or carried grenades. Behind them some 300 of their comrades who had been unable to move had been put to death. And now these specters, these scarecrows, were coming down Tanapag Plain to die. They were requited.
By nightfall of July 7 the beaches of Tanapag Harbor were clogged with Japanese dead. Next day the Second Marine Division came out of reserve to mop up the area, and a tank sergeant named Grant Timmerman won a Medal of Honor by smothering a grenade with his life to save his crew. Fighting fluttered on throughout that night, but by morning of July 9 the mop-up was finished and men were beginning to make the count of enemy dead that reached nearly 2,500. Gunnery Sergeant Claude Moore of the First Battalion, Second Marines, was among them.
Sometimes Gunny Moore bent over to count, and once, as he did, there came a shot from a sniper in a cave. Moore went down bawling his dismay. A corpsman rushed up to assuage the gunny’s wounded posterior. He knelt down and gasped.
“Damned if it didn’t go in and out both cheeks!”
A beatific smile chased the grimace of pain from Gunny Moore’s face.
“Four Purple Hearts,” he breathed. “And all with the one bullet!”
Several hours later-at four in the afternoon-the Second, Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Marines drove up to the island’s northernmost extremity at Marpi Point. They reported they could see nothing in front of them but blue sea.
Saipan had fallen, and now the Japanese civilians began to make the final gesture.
8
Marpi Point was a high plateau. It rose 220 sheer feet from the shore above a clutter of cruel coral rocks. Its seaward face was honeycombed with caves. At Marpi Point had gathered half of Saipan’s civilian population, together with the surviving remnant of its military defenders, and here, throughout the afternoon and night of July 9, throughout the following day, there occurred an orgy of self-destruction which sickened those Marines who were powerless to halt it.
Surrender pleas broadcast from sound trucks, the entreaties of the Marines themselves, the pleading of prisoners-both civilian and military-nothing could deter these Japanese civilians in the horrible slaughter of themselves and their families.
Men and women jumped hand in hand from the cliff onto the rocks. Fathers stabbed or strangled their babies to death, hurled their tiny forms over the cliff, and threw themselves after them. Soldiers prodded groups of civilians out of the caves, posed arrogantly before them, and blew themselves apart. Cowed, the civilians also committed suicide.
On the beaches below, one boy of about fifteen paced irresolutely over the rocks. He sat down and let the water play over his feet. A roller gathered out on the sea. He awaited it stoically. It broke over his body, it swept him away. He lay face down in it—and then, suddenly, frantically, unable to restrain the youth of his life, his arms flailed the water.
But it was too late. He lay inert. His trousers filled with water, and he sank.
Not far away, three women sat on a rock combing their long black hair. They stood erect. They joined hands and walked slowly out into the sea.
A father, mother and three children had also walked into the water. But they had come back to the rocks. A Japanese soldier in one of the caves shot the father. The soldier fired again and hit the woman. She dragged herself along the rocks but the sea seized her and floated her out in a spreading stain of blood. The sniper took aim on the children. A Japanese woman ran across the beach and carried them away.
The sniper strode out of his cave, preening himself, and crumpled under the concentrated firing of a hundred Marine weapons.
Sometimes the Marines were able to rescue a child, and then an entire squad of men would rush about for dried milk to placate the squalling infant whose mother had chosen to leap alone. One big Marine squatted in the
