The end of the fighting on Tinian

At 6.55 p.m. on 1 August 1944, less than an hour after Marine patrols had reached Lalo Point at the southern tip of the island, Major General Harry Schmidt, commander of V Amphibious Corps, announced that organised resistance on Tinian had ceased and that the island was “secured”. Nine days had passed since the landing of 24 July. Tinian was the second island of the Marianas – after Saipan, taken on 9 July – that the Americans wrested from the Japanese in Operation Forager, the campaign for the Mariana Islands; on neighbouring Guam the battle was still going on.

The statement found in war chronologies that the Americans “complete the capture of Tinian” matches the sources as to the date. It should simply be understood as the Americans themselves understood it: on 1 August the fighting against the Japanese garrison as an organised force came to an end. That same night its remnants made a last attack, and the clearing of caves and scrub went on for months.

The last days on the plateau

After the ruins of Tinian Town and the airfield in the south of the island were taken on 30 July, the remnants of the Japanese forces – soldiers of Colonel Kiyochi Ogata’s 50th Infantry Regiment and sailors of the 56th Naval Guard Unit – fell back onto a limestone plateau in the southern part of Tinian, about 4.5 kilometres long and 1.8 kilometres wide, ending on the seaward side in steep cliffs. That evening Schmidt ordered both divisions – Major General Thomas Watson’s 2nd Marine Division and Major General Clifton Cates’s 4th Division – to occupy the coast between Lalo and Mapo Points and destroy what was left of the garrison.

On the morning of 31 July the battleships Tennessee and California and the cruisers Louisville, Montpelier and Birmingham fired, according to American figures, some 560 tons of shells onto the plateau, while aircraft dropped more than 60 tons of bombs. Then the infantry moved forward with tanks. The terrain slowed them down, but flamethrower tanks burned out the scrub in which the Japanese were hiding; a concealed 47-millimetre anti-tank gun hit American tanks several times before it was knocked out. Civilians carrying white cloths appeared among the rocks – the Marines approached them warily, because a soldier intending to blow himself up together with the Americans was sometimes hidden in such a group.

The 8th Marines climbed onto the plateau by the only winding road, which the engineers had cleared of mines; the leading company reached the top at 4.50 p.m. During the night the Japanese tried to cut off the units on the heights, and at 5.15 a.m. on 1 August more than 600 soldiers and sailors attacked them. After an hour’s fighting the 8th Marines had 74 killed and wounded, while some 200 dead Japanese lay in front of their positions; the rest withdrew into the woods and towards the cliffs in the south-west. During the day the Marines crossed the plateau and by evening stood above the sea.

The last attack and the fate of the commanders

Schmidt’s announcement did not end the shooting. On the night of 1–2 August about 150 Japanese soldiers and sailors attacked the positions of the 6th Marines – the attack was poorly co-ordinated and broke down under fire. In the morning 124 Japanese dead were counted, many of whom had taken their own lives. According to prisoners, before the attack Colonel Ogata burned the regimental colours and gathered as many men as he could. His body was never identified; some sources say he was killed in this attack, others that he committed suicide.

The fate of the two most senior naval officers on the island also remained unclear. Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuta, commander of the First Air Fleet, who had been stranded on Tinian without aircraft and without authority over the garrison, sent his last radio report to Tokyo on 31 July. It is not known whether he was killed in action or took his own life; neither his body nor that of Captain Goichi Oie, commander of the 56th Naval Guard Unit, was ever found.

As early as 1 August Marine Major General James Underhill was appointed island commander, and on 6 August the assistant commander of the 2nd Division, Brigadier General Merritt Edson, took command of the ground forces. The 4th Division sailed for Hawaii and most of the 2nd Division returned to Saipan, leaving the 8th Marines on Tinian to comb the caves and scrub. By 1 January 1945 the regiment had lost 38 killed and 125 wounded in these sweeps, killing, according to American figures, 542 Japanese soldiers. The 67-man garrison of the neighbouring islet of Aguijan, under Second Lieutenant Kinichi Yamada, where the Americans never landed, did not surrender until 4 September 1945, after Japan’s capitulation. The last Japanese soldier hiding on Tinian itself was captured in 1953.

Losses

According to the report of Vice Admiral Richmond Turner, commander of the amphibious forces, the ground forces lost 290 killed, 1,515 wounded and 24 missing between 24 July and 9 August; a further 63 sailors and Marines were killed and 177 wounded aboard ship. Other tallies, covering only the Marine divisions, give about 330 killed and about 1,600 wounded. For a landing on a defended island this was an exceptionally low price – almost ten times as many Americans had died on Saipan.

The Japanese garrison, numbering by American estimates about 9,000 army and navy personnel, was almost entirely wiped out. By 10 August the Americans had buried 5,745 bodies and taken 404 prisoners; total Japanese losses are usually estimated at about 8,000 killed, but many of the dead, buried in collapsed caves, were never counted.

Civilians and the southern cliffs

The grimmest aspect of the end of the fighting was the fate of the civilian population. According to Japanese figures, on 15 April 1944 Tinian had 16,029 civilian inhabitants, most of them settlers from Okinawa and Japan and labourers from Korea; before the invasion 1,658 people, mainly women, children and the elderly, had been evacuated to Japan. In the last days of the fighting thousands of people hid alongside the soldiers in the caves and crevices of the plateau.

The Americans estimated that about 2,600 civilians died during the battle. The journalist Robert Sherrod, who observed the fighting, noted that most of them were killed by artillery fire, bombs and naval gunfire, and that some died of disease, dehydration and hunger. Some were killed by Japanese soldiers: according to American accounts, in one instance they tied up 40–50 civilians and threw a grenade among them. As on Saipan, some of the inhabitants took their own lives by leaping from a cliff some 37 metres high between Mapo and Lalo Points, later called “Suicide Cliff”. Americans saw parents throwing their children over the edge; some civilians were pushed off by soldiers. One prisoner claimed that a thousand “loyal citizens” had allowed the army to blow them up in the caves – an account that could not be verified. The sources do not make it possible to establish how many people died of their own free will and how many under pressure or at the hands of the military.

By 1 August the Americans had taken only 2,468 civilians into their care, but over the next three days the number rose to 8,491 as people began to emerge from their hiding places. All of them were gathered in an internment camp on the site of the destroyed village of Churo. The American military administration was not prepared for so many people; food, water and tents were in short supply, and the first canvas shelters, followed by huts of salvaged sheet metal and timber, were built under the supervision of naval construction engineers. At the end of 1945 Admiral Raymond Spruance, who had succeeded Chester Nimitz as commander of the Pacific Ocean Areas, ordered the repatriation of all Japanese and Korean civilians; it was completed in 1946.

An island of airfields

The Americans took Tinian for its flat terrain. The conversion of the island into a base for B-29 bombers was entrusted to Captain Paul Halloran’s 6th Naval Construction Brigade – the Seabees. North Field and West Field were built on the sites of the Japanese airstrips near Ushi Point and at Gurguan; the runways had to be lengthened to about 2.6 kilometres and widened, and because the plateau was too narrow, millions of cubic metres of earth and coral were moved. North Field became operational in February 1945 and West Field in March; when the work was completed in May 1945, North Field had four parallel runways and the two airfields together had six. At the time it was one of the largest airfield complexes in the world.

Place in the war

The capture of Tinian concluded the second of the three phases of the Marianas operation. The third was Guam, where, after the landing of 21 July, the fighting would go on for another nine days. The Tinian operation was later regarded as a model: moving artillery over from Saipan so that the island could be shelled from across the strait, a feint landing off Tinian Town, and a landing on beaches the Japanese did not consider a threat brought victory at an incomparably lower cost than on the neighbouring islands. The defeats in the Marianas, where the garrisons – in line with the doctrine of the time – had tried to throw the landing forces back into the sea with night counter-attacks in open ground, prompted the Japanese command to change its method of island defence: fighting inland, from caves and bunkers, so as to bleed the enemy for as long as possible. This was how the Japanese later defended Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

The loss of the Marianas opened the way for the Americans to bomb Japan itself. From the beginning of 1945 hundreds of B-29s flew from Tinian’s airfields; they took part in the air raids on Tokyo, including the incendiary raid of the night of 9–10 March 1945. North Field was home to the 509th Composite Group, trained to deliver nuclear weapons, and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 were assembled on the island. For the Japanese and Korean inhabitants, by contrast, the end of the fighting meant a camp and then repatriation: a thirty-year era in which Tinian had been a Japanese sugar island was coming to an end.