Breaching the Marianas: The Battle for Saipan. John C. Chapin
miles from Hawaii, but only 1,250 miles from Japan. Furthermore, the islands were linchpins in the revised inner defense line which the Japanese felt they absolutely had to hold after their previous losses in the Central and Southwest Pacific.
Saipan represented a whole new kind of prickly problem for an American assault. Instead of a small, flat coral islet in an atoll, it was a large island target of some 72 square miles, with terrain varying from flat cane fields to swamps to precipitous cliffs to the commanding 1,554-foot-high Mount Tapotchau. Moreover, the Japanese considered it “their own territory,” in spite of the fact that it was legally only a mandate provided by the terms of the Versailles Treaty following World War I. The fact that Japan held the islands led it to install a policy of exclusion of all outsiders and the start of military construction, forbidden by the treaty, as early as 1934.
Attacking a formidable objective such as Saipan called for complex planning and much greater force than had previously been needed in the Central Pacific. An elaborate organization was therefore assembled. Admiral Raymond A. Spruance was in overall command of the force detailed to invade the Marianas as well as the naval units needed to protect them. Admiral Turner was in command over the amphibious task force, while Marine Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith was to direct the landing forces on Saipan and then on the neighboring island of Tinian. (A similar command structure, but with different combat units, was set up for the attack on Guam to the south.)
The operation plan for Saipan, code-named Forager, called for an assault on the western side of the island, with the 2d Marine Division on the left and the 4th Marine Division on the right. The Army’s 27th Infantry Division was in reserve, ready to be fed into the battle if needed. While each of the two Marine divisions had previously fought as a complete unit, the 27th had experienced only two minor landings (at Makin and Eniwetok islets) for some of its regiments and battalions.
The intensive training for these three divisions took place in the Hawaiian Islands with Major General Harry Schmidt’s 4th Marine Division on Maui, Major General Thomas E. Watson’s 2d Marine Division on the “Big Island” of Hawaii, and Army Major General Ralph C. Smith’s 27th Infantry Division on Oahu. As Lieutenant Chapin described it:
(These) months were busy, hard-working ones. The replacements that arrived to fill the gaps left by Namur’s casualties (in the Kwajalein battle) had to be trained in all the complexities of field work. Most of these replacements were boys fresh from boot camp, and they were ignorant of everything but the barest essentials. Week after week was filled with long marches, field combat problems, live firing, obstacle courses, street fighting, judo, calisthenics, night and day attacks and defenses, etc. There were also lectures on the errors we’d made at Namur. Added emphasis was placed on attacking fortified positions. We worked with demolition charges of dynamite, TNT, and C-2 [plastic explosive], and with flame throwers till everyone knew them forward and backward.
The month of May 1944 brought final maneuvers and practice landings for all three divisions. The operation plan looked neatly and efficiently organized on paper. In practice it looked different to that lieutenant:
To us in the lower echelons it was just the same old stuff that we’d been doing for a solid year: filing up from compartments below decks to your assigned boat station, going over the side, hurrying down the net to beat the stopwatch, into the heaving LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel), and away. Then the interminable hours of circling, meanwhile getting wet, hungry and bored. The K rations (in a waxed box) tasted like sawdust; the weather got rougher and rougher. Some of the men got seasick, and all of us were soaking wet and cold.
Finally we headed back to our transport and clambered up the cargo net with a sigh of relief. The next day it was the same thing all over again, except that this time we went ashore. This, too, had an awfully familiar feeling: wading through the surf, getting your only pair of shoes and socks wringing wet, and then onto the beach where all the sand migrated inside your shoes. A series of conflicting and confusing orders flowed down through the chain of command: halt and move on, halt and move on, go here, go there.
The vast attack force now gathered at Pearl Harbor. Although there were unfortunate accidents to some of the landing craft, over 800 ships set out in the naval component, some for direct fire support of the troops, some for transport, and some (the fast carrier task force) to make advance air strikes and then to deal with the attack which the landing probably would incite from the Japanese Navy. Holland Smith’s V Amphibious Corps, totalling 71,034 Marine and Army troops, sailed with some slow elements starting on 25 May. The specialized craft for the ground forces ran the gamut of acronym varieties. After staging through the Marshalls, the armada headed for the target: Saipan.
At sea the troops got their final briefings: maps of the island (based on recent American aerial and submarine photographs of a hitherto “secret island”), estimates of 15,000 enemy troops (which turned out in the end to be 30,000 under the command of Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito and Vice Admiral Chiuchi Nagumo), and detailed attack plans for two Marine divisions.
Simultaneously, the American fast carriers’ planes began, on 11 June, their softening-up bombing, combined with attacks on Japanese land-based air. Two days later, the main enemy fleet headed for the Marianas for a decisive battle. Then, on 14 June, the “old battleships” of the U.S. Navy, reborn from the Pearl Harbor disaster, moved in close to Saipan to pound the Japanese defenses with their heavy guns. That night underwater demolition teams made their dangerous swim in close to the assault beaches to check on reefs, channels, mines, and beach defenses. All was now in readiness for the landings.
The bloody business of D-Day was, as the troops well realized, only a beginning, for the long, gruelling fight which began the next morning.
[Sidebar (page 4):]
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 89883
LtGen Smith in his command post ashore on Saipan uses a high-powered telescope to observe his troops in action.
Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith, one of the most famous Marines of World War II, was born in 1882. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1905. There followed a series of overseas assignments in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, and with the Marine Brigade in France in World War I. Beginning in the early 1930s, he became increasingly focused on the development of amphibious warfare concepts. Soon after the outbreak of war with Japan in 1941, he came to a crucial position, command of all Marines in the Central Pacific.
As another Marine officer later described him, “He was of medium height, perhaps five feet nine or ten inches, and somewhat paunchy. His once-black hair had turned gray. His once close-trimmed mustache was somewhat scraggly. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and he smoked cigars incessantly.” There was one other feature that characterized him: a ferocious temper that earned him the nickname “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, although his close friends knew him as “Hoke.”
This characteristic would usually emerge as irritation at what he felt were substandard performances. One famous example of this was his relief of an Army general on Saipan. A huge interservice uproar erupted!
Less than two years later, after 41 years of active service, during which he was awarded four Distinguished Service Medals for his leadership in four successive successful amphibious operations, he retired in April 1946, as a four-star general. He died in January 1967.
[Sidebar (page 5):]
The 2d Marine Division
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) A412992
The origins of this division lay in the activation of the 2d Marine Brigade as part of the Fleet