Inferno - Max Hastings [359]
But victory at sea off the Marianas could not avert bloody fighting ashore. The marines’ first objective was Saipan; its fourteen-mile length, and some high ground, enabled the Japanese to deploy 32,000 defenders in depth. When 77,000 U.S. Marines waded ashore on 15 June, they met machine-gun and artillery fire which inflicted 4,000 casualties in the first forty-eight hours. The planners had anticipated a three-day battle, but the island’s capture took three weeks: the defenders had to be blasted from their bunkers yard by yard. An army division was committed in support of the marines; after failing to take the densely forested position ruefully dubbed Purple Heart Ridge, its commander was sacked. But day by day, even while hundreds of thousands of their compatriots were fighting a similarly brutal battle in Normandy, the invaders slowly battered a path inland.
On the night of 6–7 July 3,000 Japanese, sensing that the end was close, launched a futile, sacrificial banzai charge in which they were mown down by U.S. firepower after desperate close-quarter fighting. “We had hardly any arms,” said one of the few survivors, naval paymaster Noda Mitsuharu. “Some had only shovels, others had sticks.” An American officer said: “It reminded me of one of those old cattle stampede scenes of the movies. The camera is in a hole in the ground and you see the herd coming and then they leap up and over you and are gone. Only the Japs kept coming and coming. I didn’t think they’d ever stop.”
Mitsuharu, lying in front of the American positions with two bullets in his stomach, 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 the 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