The Conquering Tide (90 page)

Both islands had been subjected to intermittent aerial bombing since the Saipan landing, and Japanese airpower on the islands had been virtually snuffed out. Rear Admiral Dick Conolly's Southern Attack Force began continuous daily naval bombardment of Guam on July 8. For the thirteen days prior to the first assault, Japanese defenses on the western beaches suffered under a rain of projectiles ranging in caliber from 5 to 16 inches. It was the most sustained preinvasion naval bombardment of the war.

Thirty miles long and 210 square miles in area, Guam was the largest island in the Marianas and offered the most potential as a forward operating base. It had the archipelago's best deepwater harbor at Apra. Its large airfield at Orote was the best in the region, and its expansive rolling tablelands and hard coral soil would provide good sites for more. It was unique in having been American territory for more than four decades before the Japanese invasion in December 1941. A large proportion of all U.S. Navy stewards and messboys were Chamorro natives of Guam, contributing to a feeling that Guamians were members of the extended “navy family.” Under the Japanese regime, the island's people had suffered from forced labor, crop
confiscations, compulsory education in Japanese, and summary punishment for suspected disloyalty.

Ringed by coral reefs and rocky cliffs, Guam was a tough prospect for any amphibious attacker. The island's most indispensable military assets were Apra Harbor and Orote Airfield, which directly adjoined one another on the midsection of the west coast. Beaches to the immediate north and south of this area presented the least difficulties for an amphibious landing. Conolly's battleships, cruisers, and destroyers had concentrated their guns on those beaches and the ground above them, around Asan Point and Agana to the north, and Gann Point and Agat to the south. For all of these reasons, there was never any doubt in the minds of the Japanese about where the Americans would put their forces ashore. Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina, the island commander, had superintended the construction of formidable entrenchments and fixed fortifications above the beaches; on the other hand, those same defenses had been shelled heavily and at length in the two weeks before the revised W-Day.

On the morning of July 21, the 3rd Marine Division and the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade landed simultaneously on the Asan and Agat beaches, respectively. Shore artillery opposed the landings and inflicted heavy punishment, particularly on the southern force. The southern beachhead was quickly expanded to swallow up Agat Village; the marines in this sector then pushed north through furious opposition to sever Orote Peninsula from the rest of the island. In the north, the 3rd Marine Division stood up to a counterattack at dawn on July 22, then drove up into the hills behind their tanks, suffering heavy casualties, until they controlled all of the area between Chonito Cliff and Adelup Point to Asan Point, to a depth of about a mile inland. The Japanese employed night infiltration tactics and mass bayonet charges, but as on Saipan the attackers lost many men in these gambits. On the night of July 25, a ferocious counterattack fell on the 3rd Battalion, 22nd Marines—a mass of drunken soldiers led by sword-wielding officers emerged from the edge of a mangrove swamp and penetrated through the lines to a command post and field hospital. The attack was broken up by heavy machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire. The Japanese army suffered heavily in this sequence, losing many of its senior officers. On July 25, the U.S. Army's 77th Division, less one regiment to be held in reserve, came ashore at Agat and took over defense of the beachhead.

The 4th Marines overran Orote Peninsula in five days of hard fighting
between the morning of July 26 and July 30. On July 28, the 3rd Division joined up with the 77th Infantry Division on Mount Tenjo, fusing the two separated beachheads into one continuous line. Once the Orote Peninsula and Apra Harbor were overrun on July 30, things got much easier for the Americans. Within six hours after it was captured, the Orote airstrip was repaired, and the first American aircraft (a Navy TBF) came in to land.

General Takashina was felled by machine-gun fire as he retreated from his command post on the night of July 28. His successor, Lieutenant General Hideyoshi Obata, ordered a tactical retreat, under relentless artillery and naval fire, into the jungle hills of the island's north. Without resupply, his troops soon began to starve. The last push northward came on August 8 and 9, when General Geiger ordered, “Push all Japanese from Guam.” The last organized resistance was stamped out on August 10, although thousands of enemy soldiers remained at large in the hills, either singly or in small groups. Spruance and the USS
Indianapolis
anchored in Apra Harbor, and Admiral Nimitz and General Vandegrift landed at Orote Airfield. Obata followed Saito and Nagumo and died by his own hand. American casualties in the conquest of Guam included 1,214 men killed and nearly 6,000 wounded.

Tinian, lying just three and a half miles from Saipan, was a relatively uncomplicated operation. A sham landing near Tinian town was followed quickly by an invasion in force by the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions on the northern beaches. Supplies and reinforcements could be landed promptly from nearby Saipan. Flat and forgiving terrain allowed the attackers to move quickly. Taken by surprise, Japanese defensive arrangements were thrown into turmoil. In nine days of fighting, the Japanese forces were forced into a shrinking pocket in the south. A last
banzai
charge was broken up on the night of July 31, and the island was declared secured. Holland Smith rated the battle for Tinian as “a model of its kind,” in which “the result brilliantly consummated the planning and performance.”
¹⁰²
The island was to be the major airbase of the Twentieth Air Force, which would eventually operate more than 1,000 B-29 Superfortresses from the Marianas.

T
HOUGH
A
MERICANS WERE SLOW TO APPRECIATE IT
, they had just won the decisive victory of the Pacific War. Capture of the Marianas and the accompanying ruin of Japanese carrier airpower were final and irreversible blows to the hopes of the Japanese imperial project. For another year
the Tokyo junta would clutch at the absurd hope that further exhibitions of fanatical resistance might force the conqueror to the negotiating table. But
FORAGER
had provided airfields from which the big new bombers could strike the population and industrial centers of the Kanto Plain, including Tokyo. It had provided a base of submarine operations at the crossroads of the Pacific, bringing the enemy's critical sea-lanes within immediate reach. The Americans had demonstrated that they could win dominion of the skies anywhere in the Pacific, with carrier airpower alone; that they could leap across long ocean distances to invade well-defended continental landmasses; and that the naval-air-amphibious juggernaut could move faster and farther than the enemy had imagined possible. The Imperial Japanese Navy had staked its hopes on winning a decisive naval battle in the western Pacific, but that contest had been forced on Ozawa before his aviators were ready, with the result that Japan's carrier air force was permanently and irreversibly demolished. Loss of the Marianas brought down the Japanese government and ushered into power a new prime minister and cabinet with a putative goal of finding a way out of the war (though they would fail in this regard).

Two years earlier, Ernest J. King had insisted on launching an early Pacific counteroffensive in the Solomon Islands. Relying on his influence with the navy-minded Roosevelt and his tense rapport with General Marshall, King had secured approval from the Joint Chiefs for Operation
WATCHTOWER
. He had rebuffed the objections of Admiral Ghormley and General Vandegrift, the local navy and marine commanders to whom it fell to carry out the precarious operation, and had ridden roughshod over General MacArthur, who wanted the Pacific campaign consolidated under his singular authority. Warned that the Americans did not yet have sufficient naval power, airpower, or logistics capability to begin a major amphibious operation in the South Pacific, King trusted his aggressive instincts. He pointed out that the Japanese were at a similar disadvantage. More time might allow the navy and marines to improve their margin of superiority, but time would also strengthen the defenders, who were gradually digging themselves into the territory they had seized.

Had the Americans been pushed off Guadalcanal, as had seemed likely in September and October of 1942, King might have lost his command and the Pacific War might have taken a different course. But Operation “Shoestring,” as
WATCHTOWER
was ruefully nicknamed by the men who carried
it out, vindicated King's philosophy of the early counterattack. In subsequent operations of 1942 and 1943, north and south of the equator, planners had been forced to work against oppressive deadlines and commanders had been forced to rely on deficient or awkward logistics. But the Americans had always appeared before they were anticipated, and the Japanese had been obliged to fight earlier than they would have liked. “Everywhere, I think, you attacked before the defense was ready,” Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura told interrogators after the war. “You came far more quickly than we expected.”
¹⁰³
On many other islands where the defenses were mature, the Americans merely leaped past them and let the defenders “wither on the vine.”

By early 1944, the fully mobilized American war economy had put an end to the era of shortfalls. Amphibious operations of previously unimaginable scale were now possible. On Saipan, American ground forces occasionally complained that specific items were needed but unavailable. For example, their portable radio packs were often inoperable for lack of spare batteries. The batteries were there, in the holds of Turner's transports and in sufficient numbers. Delays in getting them into the hands of the radiomen could be blamed on the customary and inevitable snafus. An intricate choreography was required to move materials from the ships offshore to the beachhead supply dumps to infantry units in advanced positions. In some cases it was a matter of better paperwork and record-keeping—if the beachmasters did not know exactly what they had on the beach, and where to find it, they could not very well get it to the front lines. Inefficiencies were being identified and corrected; procedures steadily improved as all personnel learned from experience.

Raymond Spruance, when discussing the war after it was over, often returned to the point that tactical decisions in major battles were less important than the superior logistics of American forces.
¹⁰⁴
A sea of ink has been spilled on Spruance's controversial determination to keep his carriers near Saipan on the night of June 18–19, 1944. Another small ocean has been spilled on Halsey's even more controversial decision to chase the Japanese carriers north on the night of October 24–25, 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In each case, different tactics might have altered the result of the battle at hand, but neither could have had a lasting influence on the course of the war. The Americans had developed the capability to project overwhelming force into the distant frontiers of the western Pacific, and no
tactical masterstroke or blunder could reverse the increasingly lopsided balance of power between the combatants.

On July 17, when Nimitz and King flew into newly pacified Saipan, both admirals took pains to assure Spruance that his performance in the Battle of the Philippine Sea had been entirely satisfactory. “Spruance, you did a damn fine job there,” said King, upon stepping off his plane. “No matter what other people tell you, your decision was correct.”
¹⁰⁵
He had hewn closely to his orders, which were to protect the beachhead at all costs. With a wide margin of superiority—and that margin growing inexorably each passing month—the high command had no use for brash tactical gambits that might provide an opening for an improbable Japanese victory. Surveying grand strategy from a high perch, the COMINCH and CINCPAC instinctively understood that the last phase of the Pacific campaign would be won “by the numbers.”

The capability of Service Squadron Ten to provide logistical support with no meaningful shore establishment had enabled the Fifth Fleet to operate from desolate central Pacific atolls. Now, in the Marianas, a sophisticated and permanent forward base of operations would backstop the final assault on the Philippines and Japan's home islands. Guam was at the end of a 5,800-mile supply line stretching from the American mainland through Oahu, Kwajalein, and Eniwetok. It was a continental island, 210 square miles in area, with ample territory for airfields, barracks, warehouses, port amenities, fuel storage, training ranges, recreation facilities, and a new Pacific Fleet headquarters. It lay astride the main sea routes linking east to west and north to south, and was thus well situated to support the next offensive thrusts. It had been and would remain a U.S. territory, with a friendly and loyal native population, and would serve as a keystone of American military power in the region long after the defeat of Japan.

The transformation began while the battle for Guam was still hot, when the garrison beach party and the port director came ashore under fire and began directing boat traffic onto the landing beaches. Several thousand tons of material was landed each day. Most supplies and equipment were left in open-air supply dumps, as few warehouses had survived the aerial and naval bombardment of the previous weeks. Lion Six, an advanced naval base-building unit commanded by Captain Adolph E. Becker Jr., began clearing Apra Harbor and preparing it to receive large cargo ships. The jetty was extended, a submarine net raised, and temporary pontoon piers
linked to the shore by a coral-filled causeway. The first Seabees to arrive on the island, the 5th Naval Construction Brigade, upgraded and extended the airfields and paved and widened the roads. Vice Admiral John H. Hoover, the low-profile admiral who had been Nimitz's commander of shore-based air, assumed overall command of the Marianas. A new Island Command assumed authority on Guam. Most of the transport fleet and many of the warships pulled out and sailed for Pearl Harbor.