The southern force had the situation in hand.
“Our casualties about 350,” General Shepherd signaled General Geiger at half-past six. “Critical shortage fuel and ammunition all types. Think we can handle it.”
But up north, the Third Division was fighting hard for its beachhead.
By noon of July 21, there were two battalions of the Twenty-first Marines atop the central height which frowned down on the Asan-Adelup beachhead.
Colonel Arthur Butler had discovered a pair of defiles to either side of the hill. He sent a battalion up each of these passes while a third battalion swept the ground below the cliff.
It was a fight all the way up, the men of the ascending battalions all but melting under the combination of fierce heat and the long debilitating weeks aboard ship. Gasping for breath, their dungarees dark with sweat, they tumbled among the rocks and boulders and lay where they fell. NCO’s and officers dragged them erect and sent them climbing again-to be savaged by crisscrossing Japanese machine-gun fire or blown to bits by the grenades which the enemy rolled among them.
But they reached the top, linked up, and drove forward.
On their right, the Ninth Marines were moving swiftly through easier terrain, and lighter resistance. They attacked with artillery firing in support, for the northern landings had been such near-perfection that there were 105’s ashore by noontime. They had been brought over the reef in “ducks”—those amphibian trucks developed by the Army-and unloaded by A-frames mounted on accompanying ducks. By midafternoon Chonito Cliff had been overrun in the center and the right.
But on the left the Third Marines were being torn apart.
The steep sheer seaward face of Chonito Cliff winked with the muzzle-blasting of Japanese machine guns as the Third moved beneath it toward Adelup Point. The Japanese pulled back only after the Point had fallen, and then the most savage fighting of the Guam campaign began. It was here that the Third Marines lost 815 killed and wounded within forty-eight hours, among them two Medal of Honor winners-Pfc. Leonard Mason, who died destroying a pair of machine-gun posts, and Pfc. Luther Skaggs, whose leg was shattered as he took command of a mortar section and led it forward to annihilate a Japanese pocket.
It took four days for the Third Marines to clean out their sector and make contact with the Twenty-first Marines on their right. It also took four days for all of the division’s regiments to drive forward and establish the Asan-Adelup beachhead to a depth of about a mile and a width of 6,000 yards. By then, the First Brigade to the south had expanded the Agat beachhead, had turned its sector over to the 77th Division and had marched north to the mouth of Orote Peninsula and sealed off the Japanese there.
By then also Lieutenant General Takashina was satisfied that the Americans at Asan-Adelup had all their supplies and equipment ashore and that he could now destroy them at one blow as he had planned to do. Takashina had already begun to assemble his units on the Fonte Plateau just east of the Asan-Adelup perimeter. His suicide troops had infiltrated the Marine lines with explosives strapped around their waists or stuffed in packs. They were, in effect, human bombs. Their mission was to destroy the American artillery, tanks and transport.
“The time has come,” Takashina told his commanders, “to solve the issue of the battle at a single stroke by an all-out counterattack.”
That was on July 24, the day when the time had come for Tinian, 130 miles to the north.
11
Short and sweet-this one will be short and sweet.
That was what the Marines of the Fourth Division thought as they stood on the rain-swept decks of the LST’s taking them to Tinian’s northwestern beaches. It was a dream as old as Tulagi, and even though the realities had been the extremes of the long black night of Guadalcanal or the scarlet short hell of Tarawa, Marines going into battle still looked about them eagerly for signs that this time it was true.
Off Tinian the morning of July 24 the fact that the fight would be short seemed guaranteed by the streamlined combat issue the men carried. Packs, bedding rolls and gas masks had been left on Saipan. Besides their weapons, the men had only a can of rations, a spoon, a pair of clean socks and a bottle of mosquito lotion—all stuffed in a pocket.
“Hell’s bellsl” a Marine swore. “It’s a silly picnic kit!”
That Tinian would also be sweet seemed to be indicated by that panoply of American might ringing the island with steel and booming guns. Battleships and cruisers, five escort carriers and three of the big ones, Army and Marine fighter squadrons, Army bombers already operating from Isely Field on Saipan, 156 big field pieces massed hub to hub and firing from southern Saipan-all this was arrayed against that lovely flat checkerboard of canebrakes and rice paddies that was northern Tinian. And America’s newest weapon was being tried out for the first time. Some planes were dropping napalm bombs, those tanks of jellied gasoline which the fliers accurately called “hell-jelly.” Gushing flame clouds were mushrooming everywhere beneath the smoke, setting the northern canebrakes afire and flushing out concealed Japanese, burning buildings in Tinian Town.
Unknown to these Marines exulting in their nation’s power there was another reason why Tinian might be short and sweet: the quarrel between Colonel Kiyochi Ogata, commander of the 50th Infantry Regiment, and Captain Goichi Oya, commander of the 56th Naval Guard Force. Between them they commanded slightly more than 9,000 soldiers and sailors, and between them there rankled that endless rivalry of the Anchor and the Star. Its bitterness was manifested by the diary entries of one of Ogata’s artillerymen, who wrote:
9 March—The Navy stays in barracks buildings and has liberty every night with liquor to drink and makes a great row. We, on the other hand, bivouac in the rain and never get out on pass. What a difference in discipline!
12 June—Our AA guns (Navy) spread black smoke where the enemy planes weren’t. Not one hit out of a thousand. The Naval Air Group has taken to its heels.
15 June—The Naval aviators are robbers…. When they ran off to the mountains, they stole Army provisions….
25 June—Sailors have stolen our provisions….
6 July—Did Vice Admiral Kakuda when he heard that the enemy had entered our area go to sleep with joy?
On the Navy side, Captain Oya never let his men know that with Vice Admiral Kakuda abstaining from everything but saki, command on Tinian had passed to Colonel Ogata. Captain Oya’s plans to defend Tinian Town were independent of those made by Colonel Ogata for the rest of the island. It was at Tinian Town that the southwestern beaches had been heavily fortified under Oya’s direction, and here, too, Oya had concentrated the bulk of the island’s coastal guns, which, being naval, belonged to him.
At about half-past seven in the morning of July 24, while the Fourth Marine Division sailed toward Tinian’s northwest beaches, Captain Oya ordered his six-inch guns to open up on the big American warships guarding the men of the Second Marine Division as they boarded landing craft and roared toward Tinian Town in a feigned invasion.
Oya’s gunners had a splendid target in old Colorado, only 3,200 yards offshore, and they hit the big battleship 22 times before she could get out of range. Colorado lost 43 men killed and 198 wounded—many of them Marines on duty at the antiaircraft guns. Six hits on the destroyer
Still, Captain Oya was elated. He had stopped the Americans. He could see their landing boats veering, turning, churning back to their mother ships. The enemy Marines were re-boarding their transports. They were sailing north, with their warships.
It was then about nine o’clock, and it was then that Captain Oya received word that the Americans had
