Night of the Banzai Charges: The Strange and Bloody Struggle for Saipan

Part One

By William R. Trotter

If, in the late spring of 1944, you took a dime-store protractor and stabbed its point into Tokyo, then extended its pencil-arm until its point touched the map in the center of the Marianas Islands, then you rotated that pencil until you'd drawn an arc extending from the east coast of Borneo to one of those bleak, uninhabited rocks in the far reaches of the Kurile Islands, you would have drawn the most important strategic boundary in the Pacific Theater of War at that time: the Inner Defensive Perimeter of the Japanese Empire.

As bloody and hard-fought and important as they were, the battles for the Solomons, the Gilberts (Tarawa), the Marshalls (Kwajalein and Eniwetok), the Aleutians, and the coastal enclaves of New Guinea, had resulted in the conquest of points that marked the outer limit of Japanese expansion during the period between Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway. By June of 1944, all the remaining Japanese bastions outside of our imaginary circumference (Truk, Wake Island, Rabaul, Biak, and Morotai among the more important) had been successfully bypassed and left to "wither on the vine". Some of these places were defended by very large enemy garrisons, but all had been rendered offensively impotent (and in the remoter outposts, such as Wake, the defenders had been reduced to disease-riddled apathy, too wracked by starvation even to lift their rifles in self-defense). Unless it was a very slow or very overcast day elsewhere, no one even bothered to bomb them any more, much less planned to assault them; by their very existence, they created a slow but constant hemorrhage of the Nipponese homeland's dwindling resources. To cite just one example, a significant portion of the Imperial Navy's submarine fleet, was now assigned the responsibility - not of hunting U.S. surface units - but of providing food for the starving and erratic ambulance service for the gravely wounded, the desperately sick, or the handful of officers so politically well-connected that they could pull strings and obtain a one-way ticket out of these isolated hell-holes, where the combined effects of poor diet, crumbling discipline, intolerable boredom, and a growing sense of military worthlessness were causing the suicide rate to climb, month after month, and an ever-growing percentage of the garrisons to turn openly psychotic. Things hadn't reached the stage of cannibalism yet, but prescient officers could see that, too, looming over the horizon.

But on every occupied island on or within our fresh-drawn pencil arc, there was feverish activity as Tokyo urgently dispatched transport aircraft and convoys -- loaded with troops, weapons, construction supplies, tanks, and whatever bits of heavy ordnance could be found that had not already been emplaced elsewhere too the most critical points along the Inner Circle. It seemed certain that the Americans' next amphibious blow would strike somewhere along or within that critical demarcation. The loss of any such position would signal a profound strategic shift in the balance of forces throughout the Pacific Theater; the loss of an island such as Guam or Saipan, would caused the earth to tremble as though from a major earthquake. If the Americans cracked any part of those defenses, the effect would be like a knife thrust into the body of the Japanese Empire. Furthermore, any bastion that was lost, could never be regained by a counterattack; the Imperial Navy no longer had the ships, the fuel, or the surplus of trained pilots required to mount such an operation. What was left of that navy, in fact, dared not sortie forth unless the situation was both so dire, and so pregnant with the possibility of a decisive Japanese come-back as to warrant the taking of gravely calculated risks. Japan's admirals had not become timid men, far from it, but given the demonstrated American ability to conjure enormous fleets seeming from thin air, Japan's naval strategists knew they only had one, possibly two, throws of the dice left, and the gambles would be justified only if, in the admirals' opinions, there was a better than even chance of a smashing upset victory.

At the very least, Japan needed enough of a victory to put the brakes on her enemy's momentum, to roll back the Allied avalanche long enough for the Home Islands to rebuild their strategic stocks, for the mighty new fleet carriers now under construction to be launched, and for some of the advanced and very capable new aircraft to move from drawing board to production line. Plans existed, of course, for a number of such bold but potentially table-turning operations; and if the colossal Battle of Leyte Gulf would prove anything, it was the boldness and imagination of Japan's naval strategists, for despite crucial shortages of fuel and pilots, they almost pulled off one of history's great upset victories - if Admiral Ozawa's nerve hadn't failed at the last minute, the mighty Yamato alone would have virtually annihilated the U.S. invasion fleet off Leyte, an outcome which surely would have set the Allied timetable back six months if not a year.

Japan may have lacked fuel oil, trained pilots, and the mountains of steel needed to complete her half-build new warships, but she still had naval commanders, and sailors, of great courage and resourcefulness. A devastating upset victory was still possible from Operation A-Go, for if the Imperial Navy could bring its fleets together in the right place at the right time, it still packed a titanic punch. Anything might still happen, and that prospect was seldom far from the concerns of Admiral Spruance. As D-Day for Operation Forager drew closer, American submarine patrols, and long-range PBY reconnaissance flights were redoubled athwart every likely route of approach a Japanese surface fleet might take toward the Marianas. Every day - every hour - of advance warning, would be priceless.

Two things, at least, were sure to happen, and every commander on either side knew what they were: First) the Americans would try to pierce the Inner Circle by seizing one or more islands large enough to contain a major air base and/or a sheltered fleet anchorage comparable to the one now being developed an Eniwetok; hold a major air base; and Second) the Japanese defenders, whatever their location, would respond with ferocious determination to throw them back into the sea or, failing that, to exact the highest possible cost in time, treasure, and blood.