The Conquering Tide (70 page)

When the first tanks came ashore at midday, all remaining resistance was crumbling. Roi's level terrain was well suited to these machines, which punched directly into the heart of the island and fired on pillboxes at point-blank range. By three in the afternoon, friendly fire posed more danger to the marines than did enemy fire. From the air, observers noted that marines were walking upright, without bothering to take cover from enemy fire. By late afternoon, the only remaining organized resistance on Roi was in a complex of bunkers at the northeastern end of the island. A large and well-coordinated attack on this section pushed the remaining defenders back to the beach, where they perished under artillery fire or took their own lives. At 6:02 p.m., Colonel Louis R. Jones reported that the northern side of the island was secured.

The marines had a much rougher time on Namur, which was joined to Roi by a sand spit on the lagoon side. There the terrain was less accommodating to the tanks and armored vehicles. Most of the heavy armor was stopped at the top of Beach Green, and could only provide fire support from behind the attacking infantrymen. Tanks became mired in soft sand, or drove into shell craters and tank traps, or could not climb over the heaps of rubble that were the remains of bombed-out defensive emplacements. As on Roi, the naval barrage had thoroughly altered the landscape, so the advancing marines could not identify the landmarks they found on their maps. Thick underbrush and heavy palls of smoke obscured visibility. At the center of the island, Japanese snipers concealed themselves in a brush field and shot several marines as they came within range. There seemed little danger of a counterattack in force, but the nests of Japanese riflemen would have to be cleaned out by direct infantry assault.

A large concrete blockhouse stood near the geographic center of the island. Heavily reinforced with steel, it had withstood the bombing and shelling of the past seventy-two hours, and now gave cover to several dozen Japanese soldiers. At 1:05 p.m., a platoon of marines surrounded and prepared to destroy it. They tossed charges and grenades into several apertures. The structure went up in an earth-shattering explosion, and debris rained down on the heads of men all over the island. An officer on the lagoon
beach reported that “trunks of palm trees and chunks of concrete as large as packing crates were flying through the air like match sticks. . . . The hole left where the blockhouse stood was as large as a fair-sized swimming pool.”
¹⁸
The titanic blast claimed the lives of about twenty marines and wounded about a hundred more. Upon later examination, officers concluded that the grenades and demolition charges had touched off a magazine stocked with torpedo warheads. Reinforcements were summoned from the beach to plug the gap in the marine lines.

In the mid-afternoon, marines cleared lanes for the tanks so that they could be brought up to the edge of the field of underbrush, from which Japanese snipers continued to fire. The tanks poured 37mm canister shot into the field until no one fired back. As night fell on February 1, about two-thirds of the island was firmly in American hands. A pocket of resistance remained in the northeast corner, but the final attack would have to wait until daylight on February 2.

The morning's attack was led by medium Sherman tanks advancing through lanes cleared by the marines. Infantrymen followed with grenades and flamethrowers. The last sustained resistance was offered by a small group of Japanese soldiers firing from an antitank ditch behind the ocean beach. Tanks flanked the trench and poured canister fire into it.

Sporadic firing continued through midday, but the island was declared secured at 2:18 p.m. An American flag was raised above a scorched wasteland. Peace reigned over Roi-Namur as night fell on February 2.

The army's 7th Infantry Division was assigned the job of taking banana-shaped Kwajalein Island, at the southeastern corner of the atoll. As at Roi-Namur, assault troops first landed on smaller adjacent islands and set up batteries of 105mm and 155mm howitzers. Minesweepers swept the best deepwater entrance to the lagoon. The fire support ships of the Southern Attack Force closed to within 2,000 yards and leveled a seawall above the assault beaches. Two regiments (the 32nd and 184th) landed on the lagoon side of Kwajalein at 9:30 a.m. on February 1. At first, the attackers encountered only feeble and intermittent resistance and quickly secured the eastern half of the island. The heavy punishment inflicted on the garrison from air and sea had apparently done its work. But the army troops moved slowly and methodically, advancing cautiously against the enemy's fixed positions in line with their doctrine and training. On D-Day plus one, opposing lines
were drawn across the western third of the island. The remains of the Japanese garrison was given time to dig into new positions. Major General Charles H. Corlett's forces called in heavy airstrikes and naval fire support, which steadily reduced the enemy's bunkers and pillboxes to piles of rubble.

As on Makin three months earlier, General Holland Smith was not satisfied with the army's stolid pace: “I could see no reason why this division, with ample forces ashore, well covered by land-based artillery and receiving tremendous naval and air support, could not take the island quicker.”
¹⁹

The fight for Kwajalein dragged out for four days. Prodded repeatedly to finish the job, and reminded of the ever-growing risk of enemy air and submarine incursion against the fleet waiting offshore, General Corlett ordered a decisive westward push on the fourth day of the battle. Tanks led the way, firing point-blank into one pillbox after another; troops followed with hand grenades and flamethrowers. “Every now and then, gas, oil, and ammunition dumps would be blown up,” recalled Ken Dodson, a naval officer on one of the transports offshore. “The explosions and the gunfire shook the ship. The roar was never-ending. Then came the smoke and the stench, getting worse every day, until we were heartily glad to leave the place.”
²⁰
As in every other such fight, Japanese stragglers infiltrated the American lines through tunnels and overlooked bunkers, and the assault troops quickly learned to watch their backs.
Nisei
interpreters (second-generation Japanese Americans) broadcast surrender appeals through loudspeakers, but there were only a few dozen takers, and most of the men who gave themselves up were Korean laborers.

Kwajalein Island was declared secure at 7:20 p.m. on February 4. Ken Dodson went ashore the next morning. Writing to his wife, he described a desolate landscape of “shell craters and hillocks of upturned coral.” Dodson was sickened by the sight of the enemy dead, and was surprised to find that he pitied them:

Some of the Japanese had been dead from the first bombardment, the day before we landed. Their bodies were seared and bloated, and the stench was sickening. I saw one half buried in a pillbox. You could not tell whether he had on any clothes or not. The skin was burned off his back and his head lay a few feet from his body. Another looked like a bronze statue in Golden Gate Park. He lay forward in a crouch, helmet
still on, both hands holding on to a coconut log of his pillbox. There were many, many others. I lie in bed at night remembering how they looked, and that awful sweetish sickening stench of powder, and kerosene and decaying human flesh, and I wonder, after all, what war is all about. I feel sorry for those Japs in a way. They died courageously after a stubborn, last-ditch, hopeless fight. They fought for the things they had been taught to believe in, with their poor little bundles with pictures of their wives and kiddies tied to their belts. . . . They can't tell me war is a fine and noble thing.
²¹

In the week after the end of Operation
FLINTLOCK
, a deluge of high-ranking visitors descended on the battle-scarred islands of Kwajalein Atoll. Nimitz flew out from Pearl Harbor with an entourage of officers. On February 5, when fires were still burning on Kwajalein Island, he toured the blackened wastes with Spruance, Turner, Smith, and several other major commanders of the fleet and Amphibious Corps.

Three weeks earlier Nimitz had been the guest of honor at a huge “Texas Picnic” in a Honolulu park. Walking among 40,000 sailors, soldiers, and civilians, the CINCPAC had pitched horseshoes, posed for photographs, and signed autographs. Afterward, the park looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane—clean-up crews had to cart away more than fifty truckloads of garbage and debris. An estimated 120,000 beer bottles had been left strewn across the grass. Now, upon setting foot on the lagoon beach at Kwajalein, Nimitz was waylaid by a mob of correspondents.

“What do you think of the island?” one asked.

The admiral drew a cheerful laugh by replying, “Gentlemen, it's the worst scene of devastation I have ever witnessed—except for the Texas picnic.”
²²

A destroyer carried the party across the enormous lagoon to Roi-Namur. Steaming at 20 knots, the ship still took more than two hours to complete the passage. The officers were conducted on a brief tour of the devastated pair of islands. None who saw the scene could fail to appreciate the combat efficiency of the “Spruance haircut” and the “Mitscher shampoo.” Looking down at Roi and Namur from an F6F circling overhead, one navy pilot thought it looked like “the moon,” or “plowed ground.” The beach and roads were strewn with the charred and misshapen remains of equipment, tanks, and armored vehicles. “I don't think there was a stick of anything standing,”
he said. “It looked just completely beaten up.”
²³
A sailor who visited one of the captured atolls observed that the “palms were shredded where shells and bomb fragments had made direct hits, leaving stumps that looked like old-fashioned shaving brushes stuck, bristles up, in the sand.”
²⁴

Holland Smith did not appreciate the parade of sightseers. Kwajalein Atoll, he said, had become a “regular tourist haunt. . . . The big army and navy brass from Pearl Harbor descended on us like flies.” Undersecretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, dressed in a plain khaki shirt and trousers without insignia, rode shotgun in a jeep through the ruins of Roi and Namur. Admiral Spruance and General Schmidt sat in back. The garrison was taxed with hosting tours at a time when they should have been occupied in clearing the airfield, setting up barracks, burying their dead, and erecting new antiaircraft batteries. On Smith's orders, no more marine drivers were supplied to the jeep pool, a decision that led to the unusual sight of generals driving their own vehicles. “The photographers had a gala day snapping pictures against the background of shelled buildings,” he recalled, “while visiting brass hunted for samurai swords and other souvenirs.”
²⁵

The single battalion assigned to take Majuro had walked up the beaches unopposed. The Japanese garrison had pulled out a week earlier. Admiral Hill declared the atoll secure scarcely more than two hours after the initial landing. The huge anchorage would accommodate all the mobile floating logistical assets of Service Squadron Ten, and become (for the time being) the principal advanced base for the Fifth Fleet.

Mitscher's carriers began filing into the lagoon on February 4. On each ship, lookouts leaned out on either side of the bridge to identify the locations of shoals and reefs, which were easy to spot in the shallow pastel-colored sea. Except for a few ships requiring major repairs, none needed to cross the Pacific to return to Pearl Harbor. They were able to refuel, rearm, and reprovision in the lagoon from supply ships, oilers, and barges. These assets dramatically enlarged the operating range of the fleet and allowed for previously unknown feats of seakeeping.

As Nimitz and his commanders considered the repercussions of the rapid and relatively low-cost victory, they elected to accelerate the schedule of future operations in the region. Eniwetok, the next major atoll on the program, had been slated for capture in May. But Japanese military power in the Marshalls was obviously crumbling more quickly than anticipated.
Sherman's Task Group 58.3 had made a shambles of the airfield on Eniwetok's Engebi Island. According to the CINCPAC headquarters diary, aerial photos had “disclosed that the defenses were minor and in general the atoll undeveloped. The airstrip is in use but at present appears to be used as a staging base.”
²⁶
According to plans agreed to earlier with MacArthur's SWPA headquarters, the fast carriers of Task Force 58 were to sweep south to support Halsey's assault on Kavieng. When MacArthur agreed to allow Halsey to bypass Kavieng, the carriers were unburdened of that mission, and could therefore be employed in the central Pacific. Finally, a mother lode of valuable maps, charts, and documents related to Eniwetok were discovered in Japanese bunkers at Roi-Namur. These suggested that the Japanese garrison there ranged between 2,700 and 4,000 men, and they were racing against the clock to erect stronger fortifications on the main island of Engebi. Time was of the essence. For the moment, Eniwetok was low-hanging fruit; it could be captured with existing naval forces and amphibious troops. No intervening return to Pearl Harbor seemed necessary. Why not just take it right away?

Credit for the proposal to pounce on Eniwetok in February, rather than waiting until May as earlier planned, was afterward claimed by a long roster of commanders, including Smith, Sherman, Turner, Hill, and Spruance. It appears that the idea presented itself to all of them simultaneously. Nimitz gave the operation his blessing. It would be carried out by a hastily assembled task force commanded by Admiral Hill. The 22nd Marines and two battalions of the 106th Infantry would provide the assault troops. Task Force 58 would strike the Japanese fleet and air base at Truk Atoll in the Caroline Islands, to coincide with the landings. The date for both operations was set for February 17. The capture of Eniwetok was designated
CATCHPOLE
; the carrier strike on Truk was named
HAILSTONE
.