road brushing flies from the face of a dazed six-year-old girl, while the tears streaked his earth-stained cheeks.
Along the reefs to the west of Marpi Point, knots of Japanese soldiers had gathered to commit suicide. An amtrack full of Marines approached one group, just as six men knelt down and an officer backed off to draw his saber from its scabbard. The Marines called to him to surrender. He swung. He hacked off four heads, and as the Marines approached the reef, he and the two remaining men charged. The Marines cut them down.
Underneath Marpi Point, 100 soldiers emerged from the caves to frolic on the rocks. They bowed ceremoniously to the Marines above. They stripped and ran into the sea. They came out and put on their clothes. Their leader distributed hand grenades. One by one, they blew themselves up.
By July 10, the waters off Marpi Point were incarnadine and so clogged with bodies rolling on the swells that small American ships could not run into shore to rescue civilians from the soldiers who held them. Nor could they have come ashore if the waters had been clear, for the soldiers had begun to snipe at them and the rocket boats and minesweepers were forced to turn their guns on the caves.
It was then that a naked woman in the last stages of childbirth waded into the water to drown herself and her child.
Eight days after this ultimate expression of the horror of
Saipan had cost a total of 14,111 American casualties- 3,674 soldiers, 10,347 Marines—while destroying all but 1,000 prisoners of the island’s 30,000 defenders. But Saipan also caused changes as important as the fall of Tojo. After Saipan, Japan was within bombing range of air bases which she could not neutralize, as she would do in China; she had no more carrier air power; and the inner works of Empire lay open to attack. The force of the blow struck by the Americans was measured in anguish by Fleet Admiral Osami Nagano, supreme naval advisor to the Emperor. Hearing of Saipan’s fall, Nagano held his head and groaned:
“Hell is on us.”
9
Back in San Diego, California, during this July of 1944, the new Fifth Marine Division had completed training and was preparing to shove off for Camp Tarawa in Hawaii.
On Pavuvu Island in the Russells, staff officers of the First Marine Division were drawing plans for the assault on a little island which was spelled Peleliu and pronounced “Pella-loo.”
In Eniwetok Lagoon the long wait was ending for the men of the Guam invasion force.
And in the narrow waters between Saipan and Tinian, on that very night of July 10, while Marpi Point still shook to the last of the suicide cave explosions, there were a pair of destroyers discharging Captain Jim Jones and his Recon Boys into rubber boats.
Tinian, three and a half miles to the south of Saipan, had to be taken. Its seizure, along with the reconquest of Guam, would consolidate the Marianas. More, Tinian held an excellent airdrome with two 4,700-foot runways and there were three more being built. Though Tinian was but 10? miles long and a maximum of five miles wide, it had enough level ground to make it the chief B-29 base in the Pacific.
But Tinian had very few landing beaches. The only ones known to be suitable for invasion, opposite Tinian Town on the island’s southwest coast, were also heavily defended. The Marines dared not risk them.
That was why the Recon Boys of Captain Jones-together with sailors of two Underwater Demolition Teams- had come into the strait between Saipan and Tinian. They were looking for unguarded landing beaches on Tinian’s northern nose.
In two groups, one bound for the western beaches, the other for those on the east, they paddled softly to within 500 yards of their objectives. Then they slipped into the water and swam the rest of the way, floating silently past parties of Japanese engaged in mining work.
They found that the eastern beaches were a wicked labyrinth of boat-blocks, underwater mines and barbed wire, set among natural obstacles of boulders, potholes and 20-foot cliffs. But on the west were two narrow beaches to either side of a cliff. One was 60 yards wide, the other 150 yards.
It did not seem possible to land a regiment, let alone two full Marine divisions, on such abbreviated beaches, but they were judged acceptable by the new Fifth Corps commander, Major General Harry Schmidt.
Schmidt had taken over after Lieutenant General Smith had been made commander, Fleet Marine Force, Pacific. Schmidt had handed his Fourth Division over to the aristocratic Major General Clifton Cates, a veteran of World War One and a regimental commander on Guadalcanal. The Fourth would be in assault while the Second Marine Division sailed down to Tinian Town to make a feint off the fortified southwest beaches. Then the Second would turn around and land behind the Fourth.
Schmidt was making an armored battering ram of that Fourth Division. He gave it the Second’s tanks and artillery, and he would send it in with all of Saipan’s guns banging away. The Marines would move from shore to shore in landing boats. The invasion was scheduled for July 24, which was three days after the assault on Guam.
“Guam? Goddamit, man, these men have had Guam until it’s been comin’ out their ears!”
So spoke a Marine officer to a war correspondent, and he spoke the truth. For weeks and weeks on end these men of the Third Marine Division and First Marine Brigade had looked at maps of Guam and listened to lectures on it. They knew by heart, now, that Guam had been American for forty years before the Japanese landed there on December 10, 1941; that this peanut-shaped island 32 miles long and four to eight miles wide was the biggest and most populous of the Marianas; and that its Chamorro inhabitants were deeply loyal to the United States, for which fidelity-including their reluctance to learn Japanese or to use the official new name of Omiya Jima, “Great Shrine Island”—they had come under fierce persecution, their schools and churches closed, their priests tortured and murdered, their men beheaded for so much as a smile at the sight of a U.S. plane. The Marines also learned that the general objectives of their assault were all on Guam’s west coast—the former U. S. Navy Yard at Piti, the old Marine barracks and airfield on Orote Peninsula, Apra Harbor and the coastal city of Agana. By the time the news of the fall of Saipan reached them, they had become so familiar with their individual objectives that they talked of them with the familiarity of hometown landmarks.
News of Saipan’s fall, however, did not immediately release the Guam invasion force from the slack-jawed tedium of shipboard life in Eniwetok Lagoon. The high casualties suffered at Saipan had impressed Major General Roy Geiger, the Guam commander. He thought he would need about 40,000 troops to overwhelm the 19,000 men comprising the Japanese 29th Infantry Division and other units commanded by Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina. Geiger asked for and was given the 77th Infantry Division then in Hawaii. It would take two weeks for the 77th to reach Eniwetok, but Geiger did not chafe at the delay. It meant that Guam would receive fourteen full days of naval and aerial bombardment-the heaviest preparation of the war-and there would also be time for the Underwater Demolition Teams to clear the landing beaches.
Geiger planned landings on either side of Apra Harbor, just as the Japanese had landed. Major General Allen Turnage’s Third Division would land above Apra on the north. Below it, on the south, the First Brigade was to come ashore under Brigadier General Lemuel Shepherd of Cape Gloucester fame. When the two outfits joined, all of Guam’s military facilities would have been enveloped, and the way would be clear for the First Brigade to push out on Orote Peninsula to the west. The 77th Division would be in reserve.
And while that 77th Division was sailing for Eniwetok, the men who were already there had turned the lagoon into a floating slum. All over the weather decks of the LST’s the Marines had set up tents, or slung ponchos and spread tarpaulins between themselves and the blistering sun. Their bedding was strewn everywhere. Men gasped in the heat and scratched prickly rashes. They made betting pools on the number of days they would be aboard ship before they landed (those holding numbers 48 to 52 were the winners) and they imposed careful cigarette rationing on themselves, while giving the clothes they wore fewer and fewer washings, for they had begun
