• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1186 0

saw a group of his comrades crawling towards him. One raised a grenade and said invitingly, ‘Hey, sailor there! Won’t you come with us?’ Then the wounded Japanese heard a voice cry, ‘Long Live the Emperor!’ and there was an explosion. ‘Several men were blown away, dismembered at once into bits of flesh … their heads were all cracked open and smoke was coming out.’ Mitsuharu himself lived to be taken prisoner. For weeks after organised resistance on the island ended on 9 July, small parties of survivors continued to attack Americans. Substantial numbers of soldiers and civilians, some of the latter under duress, killed themselves by leaping from the cliffs at Marpi Point.

On 21 July, Americans began landing on Guam, a larger island, thirty-four miles long, and a vital objective because it had the only good water supply in the Marianas chain, as well as the best harbour. The protracted resistance on Saipan had given the 19,000-strong Japanese garrison time to construct strong beach defences, but the Americans preceded the assault with one of the longest and most effective air and naval bombardments of the campaign. This wreaked havoc: organised resistance soon collapsed, though three weeks’ fighting was needed to suppress isolated strongpoints and secure the island for the Americans’ vast programme of airfield construction. Indeed, infantrymen were obliged to maintain patrols and to skirmish with small groups of Japanese on Guam until the end of the war.

The Marines attacked their third Marianas objective, the smaller island of Tinian, on 24 July. Lt. Gen. Holland Smith, commanding the assault, considered this the best-executed amphibious landing of the campaign. Organised opposition was eliminated in twelve days, though once again Japanese survivors refused to surrender. ‘Nowhere have I seen the nature of the Jap better illustrated than it was near the airstrip at dusk,’ wrote Time correspondent Robert Sherrod.

I had been digging a foxhole for the night when one man shouted ‘There is a Jap under those logs!’ The command post security officer was dubious, but he handed concussion grenades to a man and told him to blast the Jap out. Then a sharp ping of a Jap bullet whistled out of the hole and from under the logs a skinny little fellow – not much over 5ft tall – jumped out waving a bayonet. An American tossed a grenade and it knocked the Jap down. He struggled up, pointed his bayonet into his stomach and tried to cut himself open in approved hara-kiri fashion. The disembowelling never came off. Someone shot the Jap with a carbine. But, like all Japs, he took a lot of killing. Even after four bullets had thudded into his body he rose to one knee. Then the American shot him through the head.

A thousand such incidents make it easy to understand why US Marines and soldiers fighting in the Pacific treated their enemies as mortally dangerous wild beasts.

Informed Japanese knew that their home islands, on which millions of houses were constructed of wood and paper, now faced an ordeal by air bombardment; the Marianas airfields brought Japan’s cities within range of US bombers. The shore battles showed that Japanese soldiers’ willingness for sacrifice could extract a high price for each American victory, but the invaders’ firepower was irresistible. Nimitz’s submarines were inflicting a scale of attrition on Japan’s merchant fleet unsustainable by a nation dependent on imports. The combination of naval blockade and air bombardment ensured Japan’s defeat, even if US ground forces advanced no further. But the Japanese government remained committed to fight on: the supremely stubborn military men who dominated Tokyo’s polity believed they could still achieve a negotiated settlement, preserving at least their holdings in China, by convincing the Americans that the cost of assaulting the Japanese homeland would be unacceptably high.

Even as the Marines were fighting for the Marianas, in the South-West Pacific the US was conducting a much more controversial campaign. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the regional supreme commander, was