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

Part Four

By William R. Trotter

This article is the second part of a serial feature on the battle for Saipan. The first, second, and third installments are still available via the Matrix Games website.

"Land the Landing Force!"

At 0542, July 15, 1944, the traditional stirring order went out over the radios and loud-speaker systems aboard every US ship anchored off Saipan. And with that signal a vast and complex ballet of steel began to play out across a four-mile stretch of water off the southwestern coast of the island. Just how complex the landing operation was, can be at least suggested by studying the diagram attached to this installment - and that only shows the major groupings of ships and landing craft, not the total array.

As had been the case at Tarawa, however, the Japanese defenders hadn't been nearly as badly hurt, nor as intimidated, by the colossal pre-landing bombardment as American observers were convinced they had been. Of General Saito's coast artillery, only one cannon had been destroyed, and his men - well-supplied with ammunition and full of fight - now manned their entrenchments in full strength and began to track their first targets methodically.

The place certainly didn't look like Tarawa, either. To the Marines waiting offshore, Saipan's western coastline appeared rather pleasantly green and temperate - many were reminded of Hawaii. Weather conditions were ideal, too; at 0700, one hour before the landing craft were schedule to shove off from their Line of Departure, the temperature was a balmy 83 degrees, the sky was clear, and a westerly trade wind blew just hard enough to refresh the assault troops but not hard enough to stir up any appreciable chop on the ocean.

No previous Pacific landing had been planned on so large a scale, or executed on so broad a front. It was a two-division attack, the 2nd Marine Division on the left, the 4th Division on the right. Even the symmetry was impressive: each division would storm two miles of beach, and each division's frontage was subdivided into numbered, color-coded landing zones, each approximately wide enough to accommodate a full battalion. From left (on a north-west axis) to right (on a roughly south-east axis) the landing beaches were designated:

Landing beaches	Adjacent terrain features
RED 1	About 1000 yds from lower slopes Of Mt. Tapotchau
RED 2	About 2000 yds from first Steep escarpment, Mt. Tapotchau
RED 3	Directly west of secondary airstrip To the north of Charan Kanoa
GREEN 1	Near northern base of Afetna Pt.
GREEN 2	Directly on to tip of Afetna Pt.
BLUE 1	Straight-line through the boat Channel into Charan Kanoa
BLUE 2	Adjacent to junction of The island's primary paved road
YELLOW 1	On a straight line axis leading to The main airstrip, Aslito Field
YELLOW 2	To the base of the only high ground Between the coast and that air field
YELLOW 3	To the base of Agingan Point

Each approach lane to each beach was well marked, and each lane was separated by vigilant LCCs (Landing Craft Control), whose job it was to shepherd each assault wave along its proper lane and to make sure each successive wave maintained the planned interval between itself and the waves ahead of and behind it.

The Line of Departure was 4000 yards from the beach; 1500 yards farther out, riding calmly at anchor and very low in the water, was an enormous gaggle oFfully loaded LSTs, their cargo painstaking reverse-loaded so that successive waves could waddle off their ramps and form up quickly, as soon as the first wave began its perilous journey toward shore. Each wave would deploy 12 amphtracs per lane. The first wave, of course, was all assault-infantry and light automatics; three subsequent waves would also carry mostly infantry, but with gradually increasing loads of heavier and crew-served weapons (flamethrowers, 60 mm. mortars, and water-cooled machine guns. Each subsequent wave thereafter would carry a mixture of combat troops and the heavier stuff that would give the beachhead staying-power, including Sherman tanks and artillery pieces, along with rations, ammunition, medical teams, and various support personnel.

Gen. Holland Smith, who had studied the Tarawa bloodbath in great detail, had insisted on breaking away from "The Book" for the Saipan assault. Instead of having the Marines' artillery brought ashore piece-meal, fairly late on D-Day or even the day after, he insisted that all of his supporting guns (75 mm. and 105mm howitzers) must be off-loaded on D-Day itself, and early enough so there would be ample daylight left for his gunners to find good positions, stockpile shells, and maybe pre-register some likely target-zones ahead of the forward perimeter long before sunset. Not that he distrusted the Navy's forward observers, or the efficacy of the off-shore guns - he had nothing but praise for them. But he had concluded that as a matter of self-defense and good psychology, his Marines would feel more confident, as they faced that fearful first night ashore, if they knew their full compliment of organic artillery was present to back them up. Whether Smith made this call from a gut-level instinct, or on the basis of cool calculation, we cannot know - but whatever his motives, and however much the cargo-masters cursed at having to reload the LSTs, his decision proved to be entirely correct.

In all likelihood, Smith was motivated by his concern about Japanese tanks. On Tarawa, the Marines had faced only a handful of tanks, which acted as mobile pillboxes until they ventured too far into the open and were systematically ripped apart by 5 inch shells from destroyers inside the lagoon. But intelligence reports indicated that Saito had a sizable armored force on Saipan - perhaps as many as 100 vehicles - and the terrain around the base of Mt. Tapotchau offered large areas of open ground where masses of tanks could advance speedily. If the Japanese came at the Marines, by night, behind big wedges of fast-moving armor, the offshore guns wouldn't be able to stop them except by sheer luck. The relatively new 3.5-inch Bazooka had not yet been deployed to the Pacific in large numbers, but a large percentage of those that were in-theater had been allocated to the Saipan invasion. Supposedly, there were enough Bazookas in the cargo holds for each company in both Marine divisions to draw four or five weapons - but God alone knew where they were in the supply chain or when their turn would come to be ferried ashore. Smith had made an urgent request for them, and had even swallowed his pride and asked for the loan of some instructors from the floating-reserve Army unit, the 27th Division, but so far he had heard nothing back. And the lack of Bazookas made him even more nervous about Saito's tanks… If Smith's men were going to fight tanks that night, he wanted them to have a less suicidal means of attacking them than hand-thrown satchel charges or grenade-bundles. The Marine artillery would do nicely, as the Japanese tanks were so crudely bolted together that even a high explosive round from a pack howitzer could damage or immobilize them, and a square hit from a 105 shell could lift the turret right off the hull. "Howling Mad" Smith had pissed-off a lot of cargo-masters by insisting that his artillery be moved further up the queue, but at least now there was a good chance the guns would be ashore with enough daylight left for them to dig in athwart the most likely avenues of approach.

Another lesson learned at Tarawa was being applied today at Saipan: the early model amphtracs hadn't gone toward the hostile shores at Betio Island without any means of self-defense (each one had carried one .50 caliber and one .30 caliber machine gun sited to fire over the bow) but to locate even Japanese muzzle flashes, the gunners had been compelled to stand upright and scan the camouflaged land ahead with intense scrutiny; and nine times out of ten, a Jap sniper spotted them before they spotted a target - the casualty rate among tractor gunners had been appalling.

But today, at least, the first wave was going in loaded for bear. On both flanks, and dead in the center, the troop carrying boats would be accompanied by six of the new armored LVT-As, each one mounting either a 75 mm. gun or a quick-firing 37 mm cannon, protected by semi-enclosed turrets, along with as many .50 calibers as the crew could find room for. The seventy-fives had enough punch to take out any fortification not walled with concrete, and the thirty-sevens were supplied with canister rounds that could scythe-down charging infantry like giant shotgun shells. Those LVTs weren't as tough as actual tanks, of course - their armor would only deflect small arms' bullets and shrapnel - but they had some cross-country capability - no one knew exactly how much until the Marines actually tried to drive them eastward - but at least the infantry advancing behind them would benefit from some degree of protection greater than that conferred by the khaki shirts on their backs.

And finally, the first wave would be preceded landward by two dozen LCI-G "Elsie Item" gunboats, stripped-down, thinly armored LCIs mounting 40 mm Bofors guns forward and 20 mm. Oerlikons on the bridge-wings and bristling elsewhere with as many 50 calibers as their skippers could find room for. First employed during the last phases of the Solomon Islands' campaign, and increasing ever since, these improvised close-support vessels were capable of pouring out such a torrent of concentrated fire that they could literally shred a coconut-log bunker and suppress the crews of any pillbox too stout for them to destroy, thus giving the Marines a much better chance of working close enough to use their flamethrowers and satchel charges. All day long, after the first wave landed, the gunboats would be on-call, as close to the surf-line as they could go, to shift their fires where and when the Marines requested their help.

As H-Hour approached, the bombardment attained a deafening crescendo as the heaviest close-support ships moved to their firing line, 1200-1300 yards from shore: two "old" battleships, three cruisers, and six destroyers, hammering any suspicious terrain feature in front of the landing beaches and paying special attention to the two shallow promontories - Pt. Afetna and Pt. Agingan --- that overlooked the beaches from enfilade positions. During the final two hours before the first wave went in, some 5,000 rounds slammed into those two vantage point, ranging in power from 14-inch to 5-inch. To the on-lookers offshore, it truly seemed that "no one could possibly live through that".

But then, onlookers had said the same thing at Tarawa…