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

Part Two

By William R. Trotter

This article is the second part of a serial feature on the battle for Saipan. To read the first installment to this series, click here.

The invasion fleet sailed from its assembly area (near Eniwetok, just north of the Marshall Islands and 1017 miles from the landing beach) on June 9; assigned to capture the Marianas were three Marine divisions (the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Marine Divisions, under the overall command of Lt. General Holland M. - "Howling Mad" - Smith), with one army division in reserve (the 27th, under Maj. General Ralph Smith); along with several thousand service and support detachments there was also a very keyed-up detachment of UDT specialists, on their first combat missions (Underwater Demolition Teams - "frogmen" -- whose hazardous job it would be to clear mines, protruding reefs and landing-craft obstacles from the beach approaches; even the first-wave Marine didn't envy them. Altogether, a force of some 130,000 men was committed to "Operation "Forager", as the Marianas invasion was designated; and they were sailing in, or protected by, a vast armada of 535 warships and auxiliaries. Even one year ago, such a force could not have been assembled, even if every Allied command had gone all-out. No greater testimony can be found to the efficacy of the "Arsenal of Democracy" than the fact that this operation would be mounted, 3400 miles from Pearl Harbor, during the same month as the Normandy landing in Europe, with its even more prodigious commitment of men and ships.

The news of D-Day in Europe was duly broadcast to all the embarked troops, and after one spontaneous outburst of cheers, few of the men bound for Saipan seemed very interested. Normandy was a whole world away and that invasion had been two years in the planning; Operation Forager had been cobbled together in about four months and the soldiers and Marines committed to it didn't have much empathy left over for their comrades in France; they may as well have been in another space-time continuum. Correspondents who noticed this reticence and inquired about it, were usually told: "Yeah, that's great and I wish 'em all the luck. But they're over there, and we're over here, and unlike the Jerries, the Nips don't take prisoners…"

Mitscher's carrier planes began intensive air strikes on the Marianas on June 11, keeping them up throughout all the daylight hours, meeting resistance only from scattered flak. In theory, and on paper, there were 1400 Japanese aircraft assigned to defend the Marianas, but many of them had been sent elsewhere, in sizable packets since January, to help meet other emergencies in places such as New Guinea and many more had been destroyed in earlier carrier strikes. The surviving planes were kept well hidden, so they could take part in Operation A-Go, and were under orders not to reveal themselves until Admiral Ozawa signaled that A-Go had commenced.

So far, in their amphibious operations, the Allies had conquered two very different kinds of land-masses. One was the big, mountainous jungle-covered expanses such as New Guinea or Guadalcanal - steamy, sweltering, roadless, and sparsely inhabited by primitive tribesmen who tended to be either well-disposed (thanks to contact with well-mannered missionaries), or largely invisible and totally indifferent to the white man's conflicts; the other time was the small, flinty, coral-clad atolls such as Tarawa, where neither combatant had to worry about indigenous people because the islands were too barren and inhospitable to attract any. At considerable cost, the Allies had learned how to wage war on either landscape. But Saipan promised to be something new and problematic.

In military parlance, the island qualified as a "limited land mass" - i.e.,an isolated, self-contained area of land that was too small to permit a large-scale ground campaign, with phased maneuvers and prolonged battles of attrition, yet large enough to make the proposition questionable that it could be captured by a purely amphibious attack. Amphibious forces were trained and equipped for sharp, but relatively short campaigns - long-term staying power, which required a long logistical "tail", had been sacrificed in favor of point-of-impact striking force, rapid mobility, and limited tactical flexibility - the assumption being that a hard, but relatively short series of punches would crack the enemy's fortifications and drive his troops steadily back until they ran out of land. Saipan was just a little too big, and its terrain was too varied, for any set of plans to make assumptions based on the earlier Pacific invasions.

The island was twelve miles long by five-and-a-half wide, comprising 81 square miles of variegated terrain. It was volcanic in origin, and crowned by a dormant peak, Mt. Tapochau, that rose 1,554 feet high in the exact center of the island; from that summit, trailed away long, sharp, coral-limestone ridges, indented by steep ravines and pitted with natural caves (which, it could be assumed, the Japanese had developed into a formidable system of strong points), Yet Saipan also had some large cultivated plains, which offered both maneuvering room, long-range artillery vistas, and good tank ground.