Smith pressured his division and battalion commanders to move inland, but the terrain above the beach impeded most of the tanks and armored vehicles, and there were few suitable footpaths allowing for rapid infantry movements. On the afternoon of June 16, most of the 27th Division was landed. Smith intended to send the soldiers across relatively accessible terrain toward the southeastern part of the island, where they would capture Aslito Airfield.
On June 16, Saito decided to commit his reserves to a night counterattack on the northern flank of the 2nd Marine Division, near the northern limit of the American perimeter. The Japanese made no special effort to conceal their intentions. On the fleet offshore, sailors watched as Japanese troops rallied in the town of Garipan and aroused their sprits with “parades, patriotic speeches and much flag waving.”16 At 8:00 p.m., about forty light tanks and two columns of infantry advanced south along the coast road. Their approach was easily tracked by ships offshore. Star shells kept them brightly illuminated. Naval gunfire caught the tanks at an exposed point and destroyed about twenty of the machines. Marines took the attackers under fire with machine guns and 75mm howitzers, and a close melee ensued, with heavy losses on both sides, but especially to the attackers. The Japanese army rallied and attempted several more attacks in the early morning hours, but the marines held their positions and destroyed the remaining tanks with field artillery, infantry antitank weapons, and bazookas.
Corpsmen set up stations on the beach to treat the wounded. It proved impossible to shield them from the relentless mortar fire. Private Richard King described the macabre scene in a letter to his parents: “All along the beach, men were dying of wounds. Maybe you will think this is cruel, but I want you to know what it was like. Mortar shells dropping in on heads, and ripping bodies. Faces blown apart by flying lead and coral. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and I will never forget the death and hell along that beach. It rained all the night and mud was ankle deep.”17
The failure of Saito’s all-out counterattack shifted the momentum to the invaders. On June 17, marines pushed inland and overran many of the artillery batteries that had inflicted such misery for three days. The 4th Division marines and the 27th Division soldiers broke through in the south and pushed all the way to Magicienne Bay, bisecting the island and cutting off the remaining Japanese in the south. Aslito Airfield was secured on June 18. The 4th Division was now poised to swing north and begin driving the remaining Japanese forces back into the northern half of the island.
On June 18 at 10:00 a.m., Smith went ashore and established his Fifth Amphibious Corps headquarters in the ruins of Charan Kanoa. The big sugar refinery that dominated the town was a smoking ruin, except for its blacked smokestack, which had somehow survived. Railroad cars had been scattered across the tracks. Japanese resistance was weakening, at least on the ridges behind the position, but the remaining forces were pulling back into the northern half of the island. From his new vantage point ashore, Smith looked out at the fleet and noted that it was considerably smaller than it had been. Spruance had detached most of the warships, including two cruiser divisions and several destroyer divisions, to rendezvous with Mitscher and Task Force 58 in anticipation of a major fleet battle west of the Marianas. The transports had withdrawn to the east, to avoid losses by air attack.
Smith knew that the enemy fleet must be met and destroyed, and that the warships were protecting his beachhead even if they lay beyond the horizon. But the sight of a powerful fleet offshore weighed in the psychological attitudes of the contending forces. Smith frankly told his staff officers that he was concerned that its sudden disappearance would prompt a surge in the morale of enemy ground forces.
THE FIRST MOBILE FLEET HAD PAUSED in Guimaras Strait to take on 10,800 tons of fuel. It passed through the Visayan Sea and into the San Bernardino Strait (between Luzon and Samar). As night fell on June 15, the great fleet emerged into the Philippine Sea.
Ozawa correctly surmised that his movements had been tracked by American submarines since his departure from Tawi Tawi. He had intercepted coded radio transmissions likely alerting Pearl Harbor to his whereabouts. Large signal fires were seen on the peaks along the coast south of San Bernardino Strait, where pro-American guerrillas regularly reported ship movements to the enemy. Ugaki’s force of battleships and cruisers, having broken off the attack on Biak and sailed north past Halmahera, had been shadowed by enemy long-range bombers. The Japanese fleet was not going to take the enemy by surprise.
Fuel was a stringent consideration. The navy had allocated seven precious oilers to get the First Mobile Fleet this far. They were filled with the crude Borneo petroleum that degraded the performance of the ship’s boilers and was volatile and potentially dangerous to handle. Given the constraints, Ozawa had managed his fueling situation exceptionally well, but he had little margin for unexpected developments. He could bring his carriers within striking range of the Marianas, but would have to withdraw to the Inland Sea immediately after the battle.
Ugaki’s warships fell in with Ozawa’s force on June 16. Refueling continued throughout the following night. With tanks topped off, the fleet steamed east. The officers and men of the First Mobile Fleet sensed that they were on the verge of making history. “This operation has an immense bearing on the fate of the Empire,” Ozawa signaled the fleet. “It is hoped that all forces will do their utmost and attain results as magnificent as those achieved in the Battle of Tsushima.”18
The first part of the message was incontrovertible; the second was merely a hope, and a forlorn one. Postwar interrogations and Ugaki’s contemporary diary entries leave no doubt that senior commanders were concerned about the fleet’s readiness for battle, and that the aviators were badly overmatched. They fastened their hopes to their tactical advantages, of which there were more than a few. For all the wartime tribulations of the Japanese aircraft industry, the new-generation carrier bombers could fly some 200 miles farther than their American counterparts. Because the Japanese still possessed airfields on Guam and other islands, their carrier planes could (in theory) strike the American fleet, refuel and rearm at the airfields, and then give the Americans another working-over before returning to their carriers. If all went as planned, this “shuttle-bombing” tactic might enable Ozawa to strike the enemy twice while his carriers remained out of range. The Japanese now possessed accurate knowledge of the composition and location of the American fleet, so there would be no unpleasant surprises as at Midway. The trade wind from the east worked in favor of the Japanese, as it would require the Americans to move east into the wind to conduct flight operations. Possession of the “lee-gauge” gave Ozawa the power to control the timing of events, and would severely constrain the Americans’ ability to give chase to the west. Turner’s amphibious fleet, tethered to the Saipan beachhead, lacked tactical mobility. The land-based air forces of the Marianas might yet mete out retribution to the American fleet, or so it was hoped—Ozawa had not yet learned how badly Kakuta’s air units had been mauled, perhaps because the latter was reluctant to admit it. Insofar as Ozawa knew, Kakuta’s airmen had delivered a week’s worth of hard knocks on the American fleet and its carrier air groups. He assumed that the airfields on Guam and Rota were prepared to receive and turn around his carrier planes as planned.
On any terms other than a direct comparison with the resources of the Fifth Fleet, the First Mobile Fleet was an awesome force. It was the largest concentration of carrier airpower the Imperial Navy had ever amassed, about 50 percent larger than the force that had attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Taiho, with its armored flight deck and newly constructed torpedo blister, was thought to be the toughest and most impervious carrier in either of the opposing fleets. The behemoths Yamato and Musashi were the world’s two mightiest surface warships. Spirits among the Japanese rank and file were seemingly buoyant. Masatake Okumiya recorded that many of his fellow officers believed that victory was ensured, and “our pilots were convinced that they would shatter the attacking American fleet.”19 Ugak
i, after surveying the great armada from his bridge, mused in his diary, “Can it be that we’ll fail to win with this mighty force? No! It can’t be!”20
As always, Admiral Spruance walked for hours around the forecastle of the Indianapolis, often accompanied by Gil Slonim, an intelligence officer detailed to the Fifth Fleet. A series of contact reports had tracked the Japanese fleet from Tawi Tawi, and Filipino coastwatchers had reported a “large carrier and battleship force” traversing the San Bernardino Strait on June 15. Some hours later, the submarine Flying Fish sighted a large enemy task force consisting of “at least three battleships, three carriers and a number of cruisers and destroyers.”21 Well to the south, a short time later, the submarine Seahorse reported another large group of enemy warships traveling northward in a location about 200 miles east of Surigao Strait. This was Ugaki’s surface warship group.
Spruance summoned a squadron of long-range, radar-equipped PBM seaplanes from Eniwetok. They would begin long-range search flights to the west to locate the Japanese fleet. That these two widely separated elements or task forces might be headed to a rendezvous was an obvious possibility, but there was no proof of it. Spruance was vigilant to the danger of an end-run attack on the amphibious fleet off Saipan. Divided forces and flanking attacks had been a hallmark of Japanese naval strategy in many previous engagements.
Early on the morning of June 16, the submarine Cavalla, on her first war patrol, discovered several tankers and supply ships that previously had not been located. At 9:15 p.m. the same day, at a point about 800 miles west-southwest of Saipan, Cavalla’s radar detected many large ships headed east at 19 knots. Captain Herman J. Kossler radioed Admiral Lockwood in Pearl Harbor with the contact report: “fifteen or more large combatant ships.”22
When this information was received several hours later on the Indianapolis, Carl Moore woke Spruance. Reviewing all the reports received in the past twelve hours, they concluded that the enemy fleet was deliberately hovering beyond the striking range of the American carriers. It appeared to Spruance that Ozawa was merely probing, and perhaps hoping to lure the Americans west. Upon learning that the Japanese fleet had departed its anchorage in Tawi Tawi, Spruance had assumed it would come directly toward him and attempt a pitched surface battle. “For a second time it turned out wrong,” he told Nimitz. “Their attitude about risking their fleet had not changed. Their methods of operation had changed, in that they were using carriers again. They intended to use their fleet to exploit advantages that their carrier air might gain. They had no intention of throwing everything at us by coming in to Saipan at high speed to fight it out.”23
Spruance’s bottom line was that he would not leave the amphibious fleet, the transports, and the beachhead unprotected until he knew the location of every element of the Japanese fleet. The easterly wind would always limit the potential westward progress of Task Force 58 during daylight, but Spruance would not allow the flight decks to stray farther than near air-striking range from the Marianas. In the Battle of Tsushima, which Spruance and his colleagues had studied at the Naval War College, Admiral Togo had waited for the Russian Fleet to come to him. That “waiting” strategy was always on his mind, as he would write later: “We had somewhat the same situation, only it was modified by the long-range striking power of the carriers.”24 Now he was inclined to wait and let Ozawa come east. He summoned the two carrier groups (commanded by Clark and Harrill) back from the Bonins. Mitscher asked for confirmation that he remained in tactical command of Task Force 58, and Spruance confirmed that Mitscher was indeed, but with the proviso that he would “issue general directives when necessary.”25 He also asked to be informed in advance of Mitscher’s plans. Spruance had the carriers on a short leash.
As Clark took his task force south on June 17, he sent long-range search flights to the southwest. Results were negative. Knowing that the Japanese fleet was out there, probably not far beyond the maximum 350-mile search radius of his planes, he considered racing west through the night and interposing his ships between Ozawa and the home islands of Japan. It was a historic opportunity, and Clark knew it. He proposed the venture to Harrill via TBS, but the latter firmly declined. They had been ordered to return to Task Force 58. Clark considered taking Task Group 58.1 and going it alone, but he realized that would entail great risk: “I did not wish to find myself on a windy corner with so many Japanese airplanes that I could not shoot them all down.”26 Both Clark and Harrill returned south and fell in with Mitscher midday on June 18.
OZAWA ARRAYED HIS FLEET IN TWO LARGE GROUPINGS. A van force, consisting of Carrier Division 3 and the First Battleship Division under Ugaki, was positioned about a hundred miles in advance (east) of the main body. The van force was under the command of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita. The rear group was divided into two carrier divisions, of which the strongest, representing about half the air strength of the Mobile Fleet, was Carrier Division 1, which included the Taiho, Shokaku, and Zuikaku. Ozawa retained direct command of the division from his flagship Taiho.
Upon receiving Cavalla’s updated contact report on the morning of June 18, Mitscher and his staff officers considered the possibilities from Ozawa’s point of view. He was likely on a tight fuel budget. He would attempt to employ the greater range of his carrier planes to advantage by striking the Americans with massed carrier airpower from beyond 300 miles west. Therefore he would steam east and launch his planes either late that afternoon or before dawn on the nineteenth. Events would soon confirm that these deductions were on the mark. (Mitscher and his staff also considered that Ozawa might send his surface forces ahead to attempt a night attack, but that scenario was less certain.) To close the range on the enemy, and orient Task Force 58 favorably to the prevailing easterly winds, Mitscher asked Spruance for permission to take the carriers farther west. Spruance, still eyeing the risk of a flanking attack on Turner’s amphibious fleet, answered in the negative. As logged in the Fifth Fleet war diary, Spruance “informed CTF-58 that in his opinion the main enemy attack would come from the westward but might be diverted to come from the southwestward and that diversionary attacks might come from either flank or reinforcement might come from the Empire.”27 If morning searches were negative, Spruance instead proposed that Mitscher launch another round of bombing raids on airfields at Guam and Rota.
Mitscher was nonplussed by these directives. Like every other aviator in the fleet, he was keen to get at the enemy carriers. He was ill at ease with the likelihood that Task Force 58 might have to fight off a huge carrier airstrike without any means of hitting back. The suggested raids against Guam and Rota were not entirely sensible because the operations of the previous week had nearly exhausted the aerial ordnance suitable to such a mission (contact-fused land bombs); what was left in ample supply were armor-piercing bombs designed to punch holes in ships. Mitscher launched his search, but he had no expectation of finding enemy ships within the limited radius of his planes. They did not, although in a few instances the American scouts brushed elbows with their Japanese counterparts at or near the limit of their outbound flights. An Aichi reconnaissance floatplane (“Jake”) was shot down at the end of one of these searches. Afternoon patrols (on bearings between 195 degrees and 315 degrees to a distance of 325 miles) were also negative. Ozawa was plainly keeping the Americans at arm’s length. The pattern fit Mitscher’s expectations: Ozawa would launch planes at dawn on the nineteenth while keeping his flight decks carefully beyond the range of counterstrikes.
Mitscher respected Spruance, and was not inclined to pester his commander for a different decision. The task group commanders and their air staffs were freer in disparaging their blackshoe chief and his overcautious attitude. As Jocko Clark returned from his northern foray that morning, he was flabbergasted to learn that Spruance had chained Task Force 58 to the Saipan beachhead. The end-run scenario was a chimera, he insisted—even from a position 250 miles farther west, the task force could have readily covered Saipan “with our radar, our search planes, and our s
ubmarines keeping us informed of the movements of the enemy fleet.”28 Like most of the carrier admirals, Clark chalked up Spruance’s decision to the characteristic blackshoe officer’s ignorance of “the full capabilities of the fast carriers.”29 Ted Sherman, the veteran carrier admiral, wrote that Spruance was a career surface naval warrior who “still was thinking in terms of a surface action. . . . There were no ‘ends’ in aerial warfare.”30
Certainly Spruance chose conservative tactics in Operation FORAGER. He admitted it at the time and never regretted it afterward. He knew Nimitz’s mind and priorities better than any other man in the fleet. His orders were to cover the beachhead and transport fleet at all costs. Kelly Turner had advised that he could not withdraw the transports on June 18 and 19 without placing the troops ashore in jeopardy. Seventy thousand Americans were on Saipan, fighting an unexpectedly bloody campaign—1,500 men had already been killed and 4,000 wounded, and those figures were expanding rapidly. Holland Smith had observed that the presence of a powerful fleet offshore weighed heavily in the morale of the contending forces. His soldiers and marines relied on a continual flow of supplies, reinforcements, and ammunition over the beachhead. He needed to evacuate his growing numbers of wounded. Japanese air attacks had fallen on the fleet offshore every evening, at or shortly after dusk. Smith and Turner knew and accepted that Task Force 58 must contend with the enemy fleet, but they had every right to expect that the fleet would guard their precarious sea-to-land operation against disagreeable surprises from any quarter. The navy had offered solemn commitments to the army and marines; issues of interservice unity were at stake.