The landing on Tinian

At 7.17 a.m. on 24 July 1944 the first wave of American amphibious tractors set off from the line of departure towards the north-west coast of Tinian, an island in the Marianas lying only a few kilometres south of Saipan. The 4th Marine Division landed on two tiny beaches designated White 1 and White 2 – the first about 60 and the second about 180 metres wide. At the same time the 2nd Marine Division staged a feint landing off Tinian Town in the south-west, where the Japanese expected the main blow. The ruse worked: by evening more than 15,000 men were ashore, and American losses amounted to 15 killed and 225 wounded.

Tinian is sometimes called the “last of the Marianas” to be attacked by the Americans. This needs qualifying: Tinian was the last of the three islands landed on in the summer of 1944 – after Saipan and Guam – but not the last to be taken. On Guam, where the Marines had landed three days earlier, the fighting went on until 10 August, and the other islands of the archipelago, Rota for example, stayed in Japanese hands until the end of the war.

An island of sugar and airfields

Tinian has an area of about 130 square kilometres and is almost flat – unlike mountainous Saipan. Under Japanese rule, from 1914 and after the First World War as part of the South Seas Mandate, some 90 per cent of the island was covered with sugar cane plantations. At the beginning of 1944 it was home to about 18,000 Japanese civilians, mostly settlers from Okinawa and Japan working the cane, as well as labourers from Korea; the indigenous Chamorros had earlier been moved to other islands. The flat terrain was ideal for airfields – the Japanese had several here – and the Americans planned from the start to build a base on Tinian for B-29 bombers, which could reach Tokyo from there.

The island could not be bypassed: it lay so close to Saipan that a Japanese garrison would threaten the base being built next door. It was defended by Colonel Kiyochi Ogata’s 50th Infantry Regiment, detached from the 29th Division stationed on Guam, together with a battalion of the 135th Regiment that had been on exercises on Tinian on 11 June and was cut off from Saipan – some 5,000 Army troops in all. In addition there were about 4,000 naval personnel, including Captain Goichi Oie’s 56th Naval Guard Force, which manned the heavy coastal guns. Also on the island, cut off from his headquarters in Manila, was Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuta, commander of the First Air Fleet – but he had no authority over the garrison.

The dispute over the beaches

The best beaches lay in Sunharon Bay by Tinian Town, and it was there that Ogata concentrated his main forces and most of his heavy weapons. Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commander of the amphibious forces, wanted to land precisely there: the beaches were wide and the harbour would allow supplies to be unloaded. The staff of the 4th Division, and especially its operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson, proposed the beaches in the north – narrow but weakly defended. Lieutenant General Holland Smith warned that a landing at Tinian Town would end in “another Tarawa”.

On the night of 10–11 July Marine reconnaissance troops and frogmen of the underwater demolition teams reached the beaches in rubber boats and by swimming. They found that the White beaches, though tiny, were flanked by low, passable rocks, while the beaches on the east coast had wire entanglements and cliffs behind them. On 12 July, at a conference aboard the command ship, Admiral Raymond Spruance put the matter to a vote; the division and corps commanders in turn came out in favour of the northern plan, and finally, so that the decision would be unanimous, so did Turner. The landing was directed by Major General Harry Schmidt, commander of the V Amphibious Corps, and Rear Admiral Harry Hill; Turner and Smith sailed for Guam on 20 July.

Shelling across the strait and the first napalm

Tinian was the first island in the Pacific that could be shelled from land. From 20 June, while fighting was still going on on Saipan, the 155 mm guns and howitzers of XXIV Corps emplaced in southern Saipan fired across the strait; by the day of the landing they had fired almost 25,000 shells. Ships had been shelling the island since mid-June, and in the last days before the landing three battleships reduced Tinian Town to rubble. Carrier aircraft and P-47 fighters from the recaptured airfield on Saipan bombed the defensive positions.

When attempts to burn off the undergrowth with incendiary shells failed because the vegetation was damp, the airmen of the 318th Fighter Group turned to a new weapon – bombs filled with napalm, thickened petrol. According to American studies this was the first combat use of napalm in the Pacific (in some accounts the first anywhere). The results did not convince the pilots themselves, since the right mixture had not yet been worked out, but the bombs set the cane fields alight. In the following months napalm became one of the standard weapons of American air power against Japanese fortifications, and in 1945 against Japanese cities.

The ruse and the landing

On the morning of 24 July transports carrying the 2nd Division approached Tinian Town; the troops climbed down into the boats and returned on board, and the empty boats twice headed for the shore and turned back under fire. The Japanese took this for a repulsed landing. The feint had its price: 152 mm guns hidden in caves hit the battleship USS Colorado 22 times, killing 43 and wounding 198 sailors, and the destroyer USS Norman Scott six times – her captain and 18 members of her crew were killed.

Meanwhile, in the north, the 4th Division’s tractors were driving onto the White beaches. On the smaller of the two only four vehicles could come ashore at a time, so the men from the others climbed straight onto the low coral rocks. Ogata expected at most a raid here and had covered the whole west coast with a single company, so the handful of defenders in rock crevices and a cave were quickly eliminated; mines at White 2 caused more trouble, and clearing them took until early afternoon. Captain Paul Halloran, the corps’ construction officer, had designed ramps carried on amphibious tractors that could be hooked onto the edge of the rocks so that tanks and lorries could drive up them. By 8.20 a.m. all three battalions of the first echelon were ashore, and in the afternoon the artillery and the reserve 23rd Regiment landed. For the night the men strung barbed wire and set up machine guns, expecting a counter-attack.

The night of 24–25 July

Ogata acted in accordance with Japanese doctrine: the attacker had to be driven into the sea before he could dig in. At about 2 a.m. on the night of 24–25 July some 600 naval troops attacked the left flank of the beachhead; A Company of the 24th Regiment was whittled down to 30 men, but in the morning 476 dead lay in front of its positions. In the centre some 200 soldiers broke through the lines as far as an artillery battery. On the right flank five or six Japanese tanks with infantry ran into bazookas, anti-tank guns and 75 mm half-track guns; the tanks were destroyed. Ships lit up the battlefield with star shells. According to American figures the counter-attack cost the Japanese about 1,200 dead – roughly a sixth of the garrison – and broke their capacity for coordinated defence.

Place in the war

After the night counter-attack the Marines advanced rapidly across the flat cane fields. On 25 July, as the rest of the 2nd Division came ashore, the Marines took Mount Maga and reached the airfield at Ushi Point, and on 26 July Mount Lasso, which the Japanese had abandoned. On 28 July a typhoon passing over the Philippine Sea whipped up the sea and destroyed the pontoon causeways, but supplies were brought in by DUKW amphibious trucks and by transport aircraft landing on the already repaired airfield. On 30 July the Marines took the ruins of Tinian Town, and the last Japanese units fell back to a rocky plateau in the south of the island. On 1 August Schmidt announced that organised resistance had ceased; that same night the remnants of the garrison made a last attack in which, according to prisoners’ accounts, Ogata was killed; his body was not identified. Kakuta’s fate remained unknown. According to Turner’s report the Americans lost 290 killed and more than 1,500 wounded on land up to 9 August, and a further 63 killed aboard ship; more than 5,700 Japanese were buried and more than 400 taken prisoner. Holland Smith later called Tinian “the perfect amphibious operation in the Pacific war”.

The price of the fighting also included the deaths of civilians. According to American figures some 2,600 of them died – most from the shelling, sheltering in caves together with the soldiers, some from hunger and disease, some at the hands of Japanese soldiers. As on Saipan, some of the inhabitants took their own lives by jumping from the sea cliffs in the south of the island, and some parents were seen throwing their own children over the edge. More than 10,000 survivors – Japanese and Koreans – were taken to an internment camp at Churo, from where they were repatriated to Japan and Korea after the war.

Tinian completed – after Saipan, where the fighting ended on 9 July, and the still continuing Battle of Guam – the American capture of the Marianas, an operation whose first act had been the landing on Saipan on 15 June. The island was turned into one of the largest air base complexes in the world: six B-29 runways were built at North Field and West Field. From here the bombers set out on the raids on Tokyo, including the raid of the night of 9–10 March 1945. The 509th Composite Group, specially trained to deliver nuclear weapons, also operated from North Field: on 6 August 1945 the bomber Enola Gay took off from here with the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and on 9 August an aircraft carrying the bomb that fell on Nagasaki. A small, flat island taken in nine days thus became the place from which the only nuclear attacks in history were launched.