The Conquering Tide (89 page)

At 4:45 a.m., shortly before dawn, the head of the column charged down the track of the narrow-gauge coastal railway line and crashed into a sector of the American line held by the two battalions of the 27th Infantry Division. They screamed as they came on, as always: “
Banzai!
”

By sheer weight of numbers, they burst through a seam between the 1st and 3rd battalions of the 106th Infantry. The two battalions were quickly cut off and then further divided into isolated pockets. The mass of charging men raced southward, overrunning more American positions, until they
ran into several marine artillery batteries about a mile down the coastal road. The gunners kept up a steady fire as the attackers closed the range, claiming heavy casualties—but the Japanese continued on, climbing over the heaps of their fallen friends, until the marines were firing at nearly flat trajectories with fuses cut to four-tenths of a second. Forced to abandon their guns, the artillerymen took their fire locks to render them useless and staged a fighting retreat to the southward.

The Americans who witnessed the extraordinary and desperate charge regarded it with a mixture of horror, amazement, contempt, and admiration. It was, said William Manchester, “the most spectacular banzai of the war.”
⁹²
About 400 American soldiers and marines were killed in the melee, many by stabbing wounds. As the stampede thinned out and spent its remaining energy, small pockets of marines and soldiers fought at close quarters with their adversaries until tanks and infantry reinforcements were rushed in to join a punishing counterattack. Manchester remembered “wading through the slime and detritus of entrails, gore, splintered bones, mangled flesh, and brains.”
⁹³
By 9:00 a.m., the counterattack had restored the lines. Small parties of marines and soldiers systematically destroyed the many isolated pockets of enemy fighters left in the rear areas. After a body count, the American commanders estimated that 4,311 Japanese were killed in the morning's action. As the afternoon heat settled over the island, bulldozers shoved the bodies into mass graves. But a thin layer of soil could not stifle the rank miasma or tame the clouds of plump black flies that rose from the killing grounds and spread like a plague over the entire island.

S
AIPAN WAS HOME TO ABOUT 25,000
J
APANESE
or Okinawan civilians, many of whom had emigrated from Japan or Okinawa shortly after 1919, when the Marianas (except Guam, an American territory wrested from Spain in the Spanish-American War) were mandated to Japan by the Treaty of Versailles. In the latter stages of the campaign on Saipan, many followed the retreating remnants of the Japanese army into the northern hills. On July 8, as American forces began their final offensive, approximately 8,000 civilians were scattered within the Japanese lines. Before his ritual disembowelment, General Saito had declared that it was their duty to avoiding falling into captivity—that is, to take the same way out as General Saito. Families were bound by the
oyaku-shinju
(parent-child death pact).
They were obligated to take their lives and those of their kin by any means at hand. Cyanide capsules were given out until there were no more. Soldiers offered to shoot civilians in turn, and did not always wait to be invited. In a crowded cave, one grenade might do the work of twenty bullets. Sword-wielding officers beheaded dozens of willing victims. There were reports of children forming into a circle and tossing a live hand grenade, one to another, until it exploded and killed them all. In a cave filled with Japanese soldiers and civilians, Yamauchi recalled, a sergeant ordered mothers to keep their infants quiet, and when they were unable to do so, he told them, “Kill them yourself or I'll order my men to do it.” Several mothers obeyed.
⁹⁴
As the Japanese perimeter receded toward the island's northern terminus at Marpi Point, civilians who had thus far resisted the suicide order were forced back to the edge of a cliff that dropped several hundred feet onto a rocky shore. In a harrowing finale, many thousands of Japanese men, women, and children took that fateful last step.

The self-destructive paroxysm could not be explained by deference to orders, or by obeisance to the death cult of imperial
bushido
. Suicide, the Japanese of Saipan earnestly believed, was the sole alternative to a fate worse than death. The Americans were not human beings—they were something akin to demons or beasts. They were the “hairy ones,” or the “Anglo-American Demons.” They would rape the women and girls. They would crush captured civilians under the treads of their tanks. The marines were especially dreaded. According to a story circulated widely among the Japanese of Saipan, all Marine Corps recruits were compelled to murder their own parents before being inducted into service. It was said that Japanese soldiers taken prisoner would suffer hideous tortures—their ears, noses, and limbs would be cut off; they would be blinded and castrated; they would be cooked and fed to dogs. Truths and half-truths were shrewdly wedded to the more outrageous and far-fetched claims. Japanese newspapers reproduced photographs of Japanese skulls mounted on American tanks. A cartoon appearing in an American servicemen's magazine, later reproduced and translated in the Japanese press, had suggested that marine enlistees would receive a “Japanese hunting license,” promising “open season” on the enemy, complete with “free ammunition and equipment—with pay!”
⁹⁵
Other cartoons, also reproduced in Japan, characterized the Japanese as monkeys, rats, cockroaches, or lice. John Dower's study
War Without Mercy
explored the means by which both American and Japanese propaganda tended to dehumanize the enemy.
Among the Japanese, who could not read or hear any dissenting views, the excesses of American wartime rhetoric and imagery lent credibility to the implication that a quick suicide was the path of least suffering.

Saipan was the first Pacific battlefield in which Americans had encountered a large civilian population. No one had known what to expect. Would women and children take up weapons and hurl themselves at the Americans? A pamphlet distributed to the 2nd Marine Division prior to the landing warned that the men would come into contact with a large population of enemy civilians: “We do not know how many of the Japanese
civilians
will actively fight us. . . . The women and children will be no more or less dangerous than our own mothers, sisters, or small brothers would be under similar circumstances.” The presence of civilians required close attention to the rules of war, the pamphlet warned:

We must . . . be absolutely sure in our own minds that a civilian is fighting us or harming our installations before we shoot him. International law clearly demands that civilians who do not fight back at us—whether they are Japanese or Korean civilians working as laborers or specialists for the military, or noncombatants in the armed forces, like doctors and nurses, or ordinary civilians with no connection with the military—must, whenever possible, be taken alive, and must not be injured or have their possessions taken from them except after a due trial by competent authority. Neither such a person nor his property are the property of any one of us who captures him. It is one thing to kill a Japanese soldier in battle; it is an entirely different thing to kill civilians who have not fought against us, whether they are Japanese or not. The latter is murder, nothing more nor less.
⁹⁶

Even the most hardened veteran American island-fighters had no wish to kill women and children in cold blood, and were distressed when civilians were caught in the crossfire. On D-Day plus two, William Rogal's platoon was cleaning out bunkers and covered emplacements in the hills behind the landing beaches. When someone dropped a grenade into one such fortification, “to our horror the explosions produced screams and crying of children. Six or seven little Chamorro girls in school uniforms had taken shelter in the hole. Our corpsmen did what they could for their wounds but some of
them looked pretty far gone. This was the only time I saw combat Marines with tears in their eyes.”
⁹⁷

In the waters off Marpi Point, cruisers and destroyers continued to provide call-fire on Japanese targets. The crews watched as hundreds of civilians leapt from the sheer face of “Banzai cliff” and plummeted into the rocks and surf below. The tide carried the bodies out to sea. James Fahey noted in his diary that the sea was so thick with bodies that his ship could not avoid running over them. “I never saw anything like it for bodies floating around,” he wrote on July 13. “The water is full of them, the fish will eat good.”
⁹⁸
Bodies sometimes fouled the ships' screws, and divers had to drop over the stern to pull them free. On Sunday, July 16, 1944, Fahey attended a mass on deck, but he could not pull his eyes away from the scene. “The ships just run over them. You can't miss them all, the water is full of dead Japs. . . . [Y]ou could see them floating by, men, women, and children. The north section was loaded with floating bodies.”
⁹⁹

Special Japanese-speaking units were sent to the front lines to broadcast surrender appeals to enemy soldiers and civilians. Loudspeakers were mounted on jeeps and on vessels offshore, and Japanese-speaking personnel (including Hawaiian
Nisei
) broadcast a series of set phrases toward the enemy enclave around Marpi Point. “
Shimpai shinaide
!” (Don't be afraid!) and “
te o age!
” (put your hands up).
¹⁰⁰
The messages promised food and water, asserted that many others had already surrendered, and assured the Japanese soldiers that they had fought gallantly and could surrender with their honor intact. American floatplanes dropped leaflets marked “Surrender Pass,” which provided instructions for how to approach American forces—with arms up and a white cloth grasped in one hand.

According to Marine Lieutenant Robert B. Sheeks, a Japanese-language officer who organized such appeals, it was not always easy to persuade his fellow marines that the effort was worthwhile. “The whole idea at the time seemed outlandish to most Marines,” he recalled, “as everyone was convinced that no Japanese would ever surrender.” His superiors had at first provided little encouragement or funding for the program. A Hawaiian newspaper had absorbed the cost of printing the surrender leaflets, as the military would not allocate funds for the purpose. Sheeks's unit had even diverted its own recreation funds to buy loudspeaker equipment. Only after repeated petitions were they permitted to land the loudspeakers
on the beach. On Saipan, Sheeks toured the island and proselytized to the various unit commanders. Their skepticism gradually gave way as it became apparent that the appeals were working, at least in some cases. No one liked the sight of women and children leaping to their deaths from the northern cliffs. In the end, both commissioned and noncommissioned officers gave full priority to the surrender broadcasts, and provided the manpower and protection needed to get the loudspeaker-jeeps up to the front lines. “In spite of tough talk, a lot of Marines were quite cooperative and even kindly toward prisoners, both civilian and military,” said Sheeks. “When they saw the miserable condition of refugees they tried to help them, gave them water, and bandaged them up. Most Marines were kind guys, basically.”
¹⁰¹

T
HE FINAL ATTACK ON
M
ARPI
P
OINT
was something of a footrace, as various units of the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions competed to be the first to overrun this last morsel of contested territory on the island. Holland Smith pulled the 27th Infantry Division back and employed it as a reserve force. At 4:15 p.m. on July 9, the 4th Marine Division reported that they had seized the point, and Admiral Turner declared the island secured. An official flag-raising ceremony was held at Holland Smith's headquarters in the village of Charan Kanoa. The announcement came as a surprise to the many marine units on the island that were still engaged in fierce firefights. To call Saipan secure was to say only that no portion of the island remained under the control of organized enemy forces. Thousands of Japanese soldiers were still hidden in caves or heavily vegetated ravines throughout the island's hilly north—and every so often, for weeks afterward, a small group of desperate and isolated enemy fighters rushed out at the Americans in a climactic suicidal
banzai
charge.

The conquest of Saipan was the most costly operation to date of the Pacific campaign. Of the American ground forces, 2,949 men were killed and 10,464 wounded. In the final tally, about 27,000 Japanese fighters, virtually the entire garrison, were killed in action or took their own lives. The Americans captured 736 military prisoners of war, most of whom were Korean labor troops. Even before the island was declared secure, construction teams had begun the work of converting Tanapag Harbor into a modern depot. Mines and wrecked small craft were cleared to open a
150-foot channel to the waterfront, and heavy earth-moving equipment began the work of improving and extending the piers and building new seaplane ramps.

In Tokyo, senior officers of the Imperial General Headquarters had already written off Guam and Tinian. No naval interference was possible after Ozawa's overwhelming defeat at sea, and if the Americans had conquered Saipan, they would not be thwarted by the smaller garrisons on the islands farther south. The tenacious defense of Saipan had forced the Americans reluctantly to postpone the capture of Tinian and Guam, originally scheduled to occur within a week after the landing on Saipan. Nimitz, troubled by the long delay, had pressured Spruance and Turner to fix a date for these latter operations. But Holland Smith had insisted on holding the Guam troops in reserve for possible deployment on Saipan, and in light of the tougher-than-expected fight on that island, it was decided that another reserve force, the army's 77th Infantry Division, should be brought up from Hawaii to join the Third Marine Amphibious Corps (the 3rd Marine Division and the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade) under General Roy Geiger. On July 7, with the battle for Saipan entering its final phase, Admiral Spruance finally felt confident enough to fix the landing dates for Guam (July 21) and Tinian (July 24).