Goodbye, Darkness

  Izzy and Rip were heroes, not so much for their loot as for their triumph over “the rear echelon.” It is a blunt statistic that for every man who saw action during the war, nineteen men, out of danger, were backing him up. But in practice “rear echelon” was the most relative of phrases. Your definition of it depended on your own role in the war. To the intelligence man out on patrol near the Jap wire, the platoon CP was rear echelon; to the platoon it was the company CP; to the company it was the battalion CP; to the battalion it was the regimental CP; to the regiment it was the divisional CP, and so on, until you reached the PX men who landed at D-plus-60 and scorned the “rear echelon” back in the States. The term was sensitive and was often misunderstood by civilians. Bing Crosby told reporters that it was the morale of the gloomy rear echelon troops which needed boosting; up on the line, he said, “morale is sky-high, clothes are cleaner, and salutes really snap.” Of course, Crosby hadn't been near the front; virtually no USO shows and Red Cross girls reached us up there, uniforms were filthy, and any rifleman who saluted an officer on the line, targeting him for an enemy sniper, would have been in deep trouble. The men there would have settled for a Coleman stove and a hot-mess line, but the greatest contribution to their spirits, plus or minus, was mail call. Once the adjutant had been left with the tragic problem of letters whose addressees had been killed in action, individual Marines wandered off alone to read and reread every line from home. Usually they returned looking brighter, though there were exceptions. Some of their correspondents were unbelievably stupid. They complained about gas shortages, or rationing points, or income taxes, or problems with their Victory gardens — this to men who would have swapped places with them under almost any terms. The mail call I remember best came at Christmas, 1944. Pip got a present from his mother in Indianapolis. We all hovered over him when he unwrapped it. It was a can of Spam.

  To us the dividing line between the front and the rear echelon was measured by the range of enemy artillery, which, for Japanese 150-millimeter guns, could be 21,800 yards, their maximum, though they had a 24-centimeter railway gun which could throw a shell 54,500 yards. Ordinarily you were relatively safe if you were two miles from Nip batteries. Inside that perimeter, however, you knew you could be hit at any time, and you developed a professional interest in all enemy weapons. During a crashing barrage, with Jap artillery raging and thundering all over the horizon, with as many as a dozen enemy shells (incoming mail) overhead at one time, you hugged the ground, which began to tremble when American guns (outgoing mail) replied. Under close, flat fire the projectiles whipping in were no more identifiable to the veteran than to the greenest replacement. But most of the time you had some warning, and you became familiar with the acoustics of the big cannon. Given a little time in combat — the first days were dangerous for the newcomers — you could sort out the whines of 75-millimeter, 105-millimeter, 24-centimeter, and 30-centimeter howitzers; coastal guns as large as 8-inchers (203 millimeters); 120- and 150-millimeter siege guns; rocket bombs; and huge, bloodcurdling 320-millimeter mortars.

  Some shells moaned. Some chug-chug-chugged like a laboring locomotive. Some knocked rhythmically. Others chirred loudly throughout their flight, or rustled tonelessly, or sounded like a stick being jerked through water. There were shells that fizzled like sparklers, or whinnied, or squealed, or whickered, or whistled, or whuffed like a winter gale slamming a barn. The same principle governed all these sounds: the projectile's blast created a vacuum into which air rushed. But various sizes, shapes, and trajectories produced different effects. Howitzers had a two-toned murmur. HE (high-explosive) and phosphorus shells came with a whispering whoosh. Flat-trajectory mail was delivered with a noise like rapidly ripped canvas, and if fired at close range it neither whistled nor whined; it just went whiz-bang. There were those who preferred flat-trajectory fire, because if it missed you it kept right on going, leaving only the echo of its yeeeooowww. Those who favored howitzers and mortars argued that since they lobbed their mail in, you had a few moments' notice. The bad news was that if one missed you by ten yards it could still kill you. Eventually you reacted intuitively, knowing that you could never achieve complete mastery of the subject: there were shells that warbled after they exploded, shells that warbled and never exploded, shells that exploded without any warble at all.

  If a shell landed within a hundred yards you had about one second to hit the deck. There were some Marines who affected indifference to mortars bursting nearby. This was usually a symptom of inner despair, of the terrible need to show contempt toward inhuman missiles which were so contemptuous of them. But it was foolish; even tiny fragments from a shell were white-hot and could kill you. And shrapnel could create new perils from harmless stone. On Okinawa General Simon B. Buckner, the American commander, was standing beneath a granite bluff when a Jap projectile hit the cliff. Buckner got a piece of rock and it killed him. I usually treated ominous sounds in the sky with great respect. Once I even dove into a slit trench — a latrine — to escape a 105-millimeter shell homing in on me. Nobody approached me for several hours, but I didn't apologize. Arriving mail always turned my joints to jellied consommé. The fear continued after the war; the sudden zip of a heavy zipper made me jump for a year after I discarded my uniform, and it was late in the 1940s before I could walk near New York's old Third Avenue El without trembling.

  Such was our trade and our Stone Age life: knowing our weapons and how to use them, knowing the enemy's weapons and trying to avoid them, bitching about those behind our lines who didn't have to fight, dreaming of home, fantasizing about girls, controlling our terror, bathing when we could, if only in a water-filled shell hole, and blessing the corpsmen with their morphine syringes, plasma, and guts in risking death to bring back the wounded. Our vision of the war was largely tunnel vision. To each of us the most important place in the world was his foxhole. The impact of MacArthur's and Nimitz's twin offensives was lost on us. Most Marines were as ignorant of Pacific geography as their families at home. Yet it would be wrong to infer that they were wholly ignorant of strategy and tactics. They knew, as even wild animals know, the tactical advantages of deception and surprise. The value of the information brought back by the Raggedy Asses' reconnaissance patrols was obvious. More or less by instinct every fighting man in the Corps came to understand the advantage of attacking troops, who could pick the time and place of assault, and the defenders' advantage, that of fortifying likely targets. Some men even grasped the evolution of amphibious warfare, a combination of strategic offense and tactical defense — once a beachhead had been taken, the invaders could form a perimeter and await the Jap counterattacks. Success in amphibious offensives clearly turned on coordination. Everyone knew when synchronization went wrong. It had happened on Tarawa. It happened again on Saipan.

  At dawn on June 13, 1944, as President Roosevelt prepared to run for a fourth term, the mightiest fleet in history till then steamed into the Philippine Sea: 112 U.S. warships, led by 7 battleships and 15 flattops carrying nearly a thousand warplanes. In their midst were 423 transports and freighters bearing 127,571 fighting men: the Second, Third, and Fourth Marine divisions, the First Provisional Marine Brigade, and the Twenty-seventh Army Division. The overall commander was a Marine general, Holland “Howling Mad” Smith. The commander of the Twenty-seventh Division was an army general, Ralph Smith. (The two Smiths cannot be confused, as we shall see.) The task force's mission was the capture of the three great Marianas islands — Guam, Saipan, and Tinian — each almost completely encircled by coral reefs. The prize was to be Guam, with its magnificent anchorage and many airstrips, but Saipan was to be seized first. Saipan was closer to Tokyo and therefore a better base for the new B-29 Superfortresses, which, using Aslito air base, at the southern end of the island, could fly daily raids over Tokyo. Tinian, lightly defended, would fall almost of its own weight. Meanwhile, three days after the landing on Saipan, the Marines were scheduled to hit Guam. Actually they didn't wade ashore on Guam until over a m
onth later. Saipan, like Tarawa — like all the Marine battles which were to follow — was far tougher than anyone had expected.

  Seahorse-shaped Saipan is a tropical isle of luxuriant beauty, rippling green ridges, and big rawboned valleys. The island is about as far north of the equator as the Virgin Islands, with the same matted, overgrown brush, and it is roughly the size of Saint Croix. A spine of volcanic mountains, topped by Mount Tipo Pale and the 1,554-foot crag of almost unscalable Mount Tapotchau, dominates the interior. To the north and east, rugged country — angular, flinty, and gnarled with precipitous gorges — pitches and yaws until it reaches steep limestone-and-coral cliffs, as sheer as Dover's, overlooking the sea at Marpi Point. South and west of Tapotchau the land is gentler. Terraced hills and fields of sugarcane glide gracefully toward a long, level plain. The waters over the reef are emerald; in the harbor they are sapphire blue. Lovely beaches fringe them. The Japanese knew that this was where the Americans would come when they came.

  At that point in the war, the enemy was still committed to defending its islands at the waterline. Kuzumi's Biak tactics had not yet been wholly accepted in Tokyo as army doctrine. Not an inch of Saipan would be yielded without a fight, whatever the strategic logic. Phony lighthouses had been built near the shore and stocked with ammunition. (One of them still stands across the road from a rusty jail cell where, say some, Amelia Earhart was imprisoned and decapitated in 1937; forced down, so the story goes, she had seen the island's fortifications, already formidable and a violation of the League of Nations mandate, and therefore she and her copilot were executed.) Long before the American armada approached, Yoshitsugu Saito, the Jap commander, had impressed Chamorro and Carolinian natives as laborers to build concrete blockhouses, pillboxes, and ammunition bunkers. Then the islanders and imported Okinawan conscripts had spent eight back-breaking months constructing a new coral airstrip at Marpi Point. Overlooking the beaches, Saito's men sited 5-inch, 5.5-inch, 6-inch, and 8-inch coastal guns. Spider holes were dug, backed by earthworks, trenches, and, in the limestone heights, intricate networks of caves. Inside these warrens were 29,662 enemy soldiers and 6,100 Japanese Marines. All muzzles were trained on the reef.

  On the clear, bright morning of June 15 Admiral Turner hoisted the traditional signal, “Land the Landing Force,” and set H-hour at 8:40 a.m. As the first amphtracs bellied over the reef, the coral seemed to erupt in a curtain of flame. Officers aboard the U.S. fleet, seeing it, assumed that the reef had been mined. In fact every explosion was a mortar or artillery shell. Two Marine divisions (the third was in reserve) were landing on eleven beaches coded Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow. Those who made it over the reef formed shallow, vulnerable beachheads, where they were pinned down by machine-gun fire in front and shelling on their flanks. They were, for the moment, as helpless as those — some of them the same Marines — who had had to endure the calvary of Tarawa seven months earlier. Five battalion commanders were wounded on Saipan's first day; one battalion in the Sixth Marines lost three commanders before night fell. Some lessons had been learned at Betio. Working under fire, U.S. underwater demolitions teams, who surely had the war's most dangerous job, had breached the beach obstacles the night before, and the timetables of our bomber pilots had been improved. But the interdictive power of naval gunfire and blockbuster bombs had again been miscalculated. Our navy's broadsides simply couldn't reach the big blockhouses on so large an island. Older but more experienced battleships were allowed just one day to hit their shore targets, and gunnery officers on new battleships, untrained in amphibious bombardments, were wildly inaccurate. Amphtrac coxswains fought a strong sea current which had been mentioned in none of the intelligence reports, delivering some companies to the wrong beaches, where they milled around in confusion. By nightfall 1,575 men had fallen. Nevertheless, over 20,000 were ashore, and during that first night they hurled back two banzai charges.

  In a war that was being fought on the sea and in the air, as well as on land, news of pivotal developments elsewhere often reached riflemen slowly. The youths on Saipan's gently sloping beaches were unaware that their landing had set off a chain of events which would lead to a tremendous engagement in the skies over the Marianas. The Japs hadn't expected the U.S. tide to lap at Saipan, a thousand miles from the nearest Allied base, so soon. They had, however, been gearing up for a decisive, do-or-die battle. Their warships were plowing toward Biak, where MacArthur's men were still fighting, when they learned of this new blow, with far graver strategic consequences for them. So they headed for the American armada off Saipan with nine of Hirohito's carriers, five battleships, thirteen cruisers, and twenty-eight destroyers. Unfortunately for them, they had lost most of their experienced pilots in earlier engagements; the new fliers were green and ill trained, and Nip warplanes on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, essential to their battle plan, had been wiped out by U.S. carrier strikes in the days before the Saipan landing.

  The result was the Battle of the Philippine Sea, or, as we came to call it, the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” As the first Zeroes and Nip torpedo bombers appeared on American radar screens, the old circus rallying cry, “Hey, Rube!” was radioed to all U.S. fliers already airborne, while their carriers began rotating landings and takeoffs to keep umbrellas of fighters overhead throughout the day-light hours. At 10:36 a.m. on the crucial day the first American pilot cried, “Tallyho!” and the slaughter, as it became, was on. By dusk 346 Nip aircraft had been flamed or splashed at a cost of 30 U.S. planes. The enemy's naval air arm had lost 75 percent of its force. Only thirty demoralized Jap fliers had survived. In addition, American submarines had sunk two Rising Sun carriers. The decisive battle had in fact been fought — and the Japs had lost it. In the mournful words of a Japanese historian, “The garrison on the Mariana Islands resembled fish caught in a casting net.” Saito radioed Tokyo: “Please apologize deeply to the Emperor that we cannot do better than we are doing.” Then he began burning his secret papers.

  Saito's defeatism was unknown to the embattled armies on Saipan. All Holland Smith knew was that his troops were in the thick of a desperate battle. On the second night of the struggle the Japanese launched their first large-scale World War II tank attack against Marines: forty-four steel Goliaths hit the left flank of the Second Marine Division at 3:30 a.m. The American riflemen stood in their foxholes, throwing grenades and firing bazookas as the Nip tanks cruised among them, and U.S. warships offshore, guided by a Marine colonel — he sat on a stump in the middle of the melee, tranquilly puffing a cigar — laid heavy shells on the enemy position. At dawn the colonel was still on the stump, still puffing, with thirty-one derelict Jap tank hulks around him.

  Holland Smith's plan was to send the Fourth Marine Division straight ahead, taking the big airfield, while the Second Marine Division wheeled northward toward the town of Garapan and the high ground. Then Ralph Smith's Twenty-seventh Army Division would be brought ashore, and the three divisions would sweep northward, the two Marine divisions on the flanks and the army division in the center, pushing the enemy troops toward Saipan's northern tip. By the fourth day of fighting, the island had been cut in two; by the eighth day, the lower half of it had been cleared of Nips. A battalion of my regiment, the Twenty-ninth Marines, was assigned the cruel job of seizing Mount Tapotchau's crest. It seemed impossible then; it seems so now. A heavy Toyota truck with four-wheel drive will take you halfway to the summit over a new, if unpaved, road. You cover the rest on all fours. Even Tapot-chau's foothills are awesome. It was all you could do to climb them, let alone fight your way to the top.

  On Friday, June 23, the ninth day of the struggle, Holland Smith ordered the great three-divisional sweep northward. Both Marine divisions moved well; Mount Tipo Pale was taken, riflemen began their agonizing ascent of Tapotchau, and the Second Marines battled their way into the outskirts of Garapan. But Ralph Smith's GIs seemed impotent. Their jump-off was fifty-five minutes late; they edged forward cautiously, then stopped altogether. Because the Marines continu
ed to pick up momentum, fighting the Japs in caves with grenades and pole charges and the terrain with bulldozers, the American front formed a shallow U, exposing the Marines' flanks. Ralph Smith reprimanded his regimental commanders. He himself received a gruff message from Holland Smith informing him that Howling Mad was “highly displeased” with the GIs' performance. The next day was worse. The two Marine divisions continued to move forward on the flanks while the army division dug in, deepening the U. Holland Smith took a long look at his situation map and blew his top. He told Admirals Turner and Spruance: “Ralph Smith has shown that he lacks aggressive spirit, and his division is slowing down our advance. He should be relieved.” He was, whereupon it developed that others, admirers of Ralph, also had tempers. The Hearst press was enraged. In Washington George Marshall swore that he would never again agree to put his soldiers under Marine officers, and the senior army general in Nimitz's theater arrived on Saipan with blood in his eye. Convening an inquiry (for which he had no authority), he yelled at Holland Smith and his staff: “We've had more experience in handling troops than you've had, and yet you dare remove one of my generals! You Marines are nothing but a bunch of beach runners anyway. What do you know about land warfare?”