[Marine brigadier general] Holland Smith, ever the realist, warned his landing force commanders of the tough job ahead. "We are through with the flat atolls now," said Smith. "Now we are up against mountains and caves where the Japs can really dig in. A week from now there be a lot of dead Marines." Smith might have added another caveat: in the Saipan town of Garapan the Marines would face house-to-house fighting for the first time since Vera Cruz in 1914.
Neither Holland Smith nor
[USN Admiral] Kelly Turner wanted to repeat the complicated choreography of Tarawa.
The amphibious task force therefore stopped at Eniwetok Atoll to "shoe-horn" assault
troops into LSTs [tank landing ships], already loaded with amtracs. The
rough-riding ships steamed directly for Saipan's southwest coast. Arriving in
darkness early on D-Day, 15-June, the LSTs dropped anchor on line fifty-five
hundred yards offshore, opened their bow doors, and launched their loaded LVTs
[tracked landing vehicles] toward the beach. The line of departure lay directly
ahead.
As dawn broke, Navy and Marine control officers in offshore small craft were startled to see small red flags along the reef. They had not been there yesterday. The Japanese, tipped off by the preliminary UDT [underwater demolitions team] survey, had placed range markers offshore for their artillery spotters...
The Japanese maintained good fire discipline, waiting until the LVTs struck the reef line before opening fire. Naval observers, recoiling at the sudden curtain of explosions that erupted all along the line, thought the reef had been mined. What they were seeing was a well-orchestrated "time-on-target" artillery and mortar barrage performed by Japanese gunners firing from a hundred reverse-slope emplacements. Although never as grim as Tarawa had been— or Peleliu would soon be— the ship-to-shore assault at Saipan nevertheless had its own moments of sheer horror. One large-caliber round made a direct hit on an LVT carrying the assault elements of Company C, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines. The force of the explosion blew several men to bits. Lt. Paul M. Dodd was grievously wounded by bones blasted from the marines next to him. The vehicle foundered in the surf, then drifted out to sea, a gruesome, smoking relic.
But Turner and Smith's insistence on direct delivery of preloaded LVTs just seaward of the line of departure served to maximize surprise and minimize exposure to the Japanese killing zones. Somehow the Marines lost only twenty LVTs to the combination of high surf and enemy fire in the initial assault. A formidable force of twenty thousand men had stormed ashore by nightfall, but they sustained nearly two thousand casualties, mainly from unrelenting artillery and mortar fire delivered along the crowded beaches, the most skillful the Marines had yet faced. Both divisions landed their artillery units early to help equal the odds, but the Japanese that first day were looking right down the Marines' throats.
Night counterattacks characterized the fighting on Saipan throughout the weeks of the battle. One of these, shortly after the landing, included the first armored counterattack the Marines had experienced, some forty Japanese medium tanks roaring through the darkness toward the beach. But the Marines were ashore to stay. This time they had plenty of bazookas and Sherman tanks at hand. There was never a question of "issue in doubt" as at Tarawa.
The only real threat to the capture of Saipan came when Admiral Toyoda dispatched his principal task force, the Mobile Fleet, into the Philippine Sea with orders to sink the American carriers, then destroy the amphibious task force off Saipan. [Commander of the Central Pacific Force, Vice Adm. Raymond] Spruance did not overreact. He directed Turner and Smith to offload the 27th Infantry Division immediately and prepare for curtailed support from the fleet. The amphibs would still dart in to unload critical supplies; the gunships could still return for called fire missions. Spruance then uncoiled Mitscher's Task Force 58. The resulting Battle of the Philippine Sea, which included "the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot," became a convincing naval victory for the United States. While the carrier admirals (and even genial Chester Nimitz) expressed keen disappointment when Spruance allowed the major components of the Mobile Fleet to escape destruction, the landing force appreciated his caution, Spruance took the heat calmly. His primary mission, he reminded his critics, was to capture Saipan by amphibious assault. "We were at the start of a very large amphibious operation, and we could not afford to gamble and place it in jeopardy." These words did little to placate his critics, but some strategists would take another look at Spruance's practical conservatism later that fall after Halsey abandoned the Leyte beachheads to chase what he believed to be the Japanese fleet.
Nor did Spruance's distraction with the Mobile Fleet result in another Guadalcanal for the landing force. Amphibious ships unloaded 11,500 tons of combat cargo across the beach at the height of the naval battle. General Saito then knew his cause was lost. There would be no rescue by the Japanese fleet, no reinforcements for his beleaguered garrison.
Late in the battle, surviving Japanese troops staged a massive banzai attack, some four thousand troops screaming out of the night with swords and grenades. Finding a wide gap in the American lines, the human waves penetrated several thousand yards to overlap the artillerymen of the m14th Marines. The cannoneers died by their guns in desperate, close range fighting. Daylight brought reinforcements and succor, but the slaughter had been great on both sides.
Another horror followed. As Marines ands soldiers converged on the final enemy positions near Marpi Point in the north, hundreds of Japanese and native civilians, convinced by their garrison that Americans would torture them, began jumping off the cliffs onto the rocks below—entire families, including infants. In a war increasingly marked by cruelty and devastation, these scenes proved awful to behold by even the most battle-hardened Americans. Admiral Nimitz, visiting the site several days later, became visibly moved at the sight of the bodies strewn along the rocks far below. The experience convinced Nimitz that an invasion of the Japanese homeland would result in the virtual extermination of the civilian population.
Holland Smith declared Saipan
"secured" on 9 July, putting an official ending to twenty-four days of close
combat. American casualties reached sixteen thousand. Virtually all of the
twenty-thousand-man Japanese garrison perished. Now Spruance directed his
commanders to the other two objectives in the Marianas: first, Guam, then Tinian,
separate and nearly simultaneous operations.