The last attack on Saipan

On 6 July 1944, in the third week of fighting on Saipan, Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saitō, commanding the island’s defence, concluded that further resistance was pointless. That morning he issued his last order: everyone still able to fight was to go over to the attack, kill as many Americans as possible and die. The next day, before dawn on 7 July, several thousand Japanese soldiers, sailors and civilians struck the American positions on the Tanapag plain on the west coast of the island. It was the largest banzai charge of the Pacific War – the Japanese called such an attack gyokusai, “shattering the jewel”, meaning the honourable death of an entire unit.

Many chronologies place under 6 July “the largest banzai charge of the war”, in which “4,300 Japanese soldiers were slaughtered”. But 6 July was the day of Saitō’s order; the attack itself began at around four in the morning of 7 July. The figure of 4,311 comes from an American count of bodies over the whole area of the attack, ordered by the commander of the 27th Infantry Division – yet some of those dead had been killed earlier by artillery and naval gunfire. The US official history estimates the number of attackers at about 3,000, and other tallies at 3,000–4,000. Nor were all of them soldiers: among the attackers were wounded men from the field hospitals and some civilians.

An island lost

The Americans landed on Saipan on 15 June, after several days of carrier air strikes and naval bombardment. The Japanese fleet that was to come to the defenders’ aid was defeated in the Battle of the Philippine Sea on 19–20 June – the clash American airmen called the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”. From then on the island’s garrison was entirely on its own. The commander of the US Fifth Fleet, Admiral Raymond Spruance, controlled the sea and the air around the Marianas, and the defenders could count on neither reinforcement nor evacuation.

Over the next two weeks three American divisions – the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions and the Army’s 27th Infantry Division – pushed the Japanese northwards, across the massif of Mount Tapotchau and through the ruins of the town of Garapan. By the beginning of July the remnants of the Japanese units held only the northern tip of the island. They lacked ammunition, water and food; their artillery had been almost entirely destroyed, and communications between units were largely cut. The command was disintegrating along with the army, and men hiding in caves were dying under fire, no longer even able to shoot back.

Saitō’s headquarters was in a cave in a valley running inland from the village of Makunsha on the west coast – the Americans called it “Paradise Valley”, the Japanese “Hell Valley”. Also there was Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, once commander of the carriers at Pearl Harbor and Midway, and since March 1944 commander of the Central Pacific Area Fleet – a formation with a grand name but no ships capable of fighting. Rear Admiral Takeo Yano, commander of the naval forces on Saipan, was also on the island. Saitō’s formal superior, Lieutenant General Hideyoshi Obata, commander of the Thirty-First Army, had been on Guam at the time of the invasion and could not get back.

Saitō’s order

At around six on the morning of 6 July Saitō issued a proclamation to the soldiers defending Saipan. Its text, intercepted by the Americans and quoted in the US official history, read in part: “Whether we attack or whether we stay where we are, there is only death. However, in death there is life. […] I will advance with those who remain to deliver still another blow to the American devils, and leave my bones on Saipan as a bulwark of the Pacific.” The general invoked the Senjinkun, the military code of conduct of 1941, which enjoined soldiers not to be taken alive, and ended with the words: “Follow me!”

Saitō, however, did not lead the attack. He was exhausted, ill and wounded by a shell fragment. According to the account of a Japanese officer later taken prisoner, the general sat down on a rock, faced towards Japan, cried out in honour of the Emperor and cut himself with his sword, whereupon his adjutant finished him off with a pistol shot – the ritual of seppuku. The US official history places his death shortly after he issued the order, on 6 July; other accounts speak of the early hours of 7 July. At about the same time Nagumo took his own life – according to the version most often repeated, with a pistol shot to the temple, although some authors also write of seppuku. The Americans found Saitō’s body a few days later and buried it with military honours; according to American accounts, Nagumo’s remains were found by marines in one of the caves. The admiral whose carriers had inflicted defeat on the American fleet in December 1941 died on an island from which American bombers would soon be flying to Tokyo.

The attack on the Tanapag plain

Everyone who could be gathered was gathered for the attack. Among the dead the Americans later identified soldiers of the three infantry regiments of the 43rd Division, of the division’s headquarters and its field hospital, mountain gunners, engineers, and sailors from combat units, service units and labour companies. Some had rifles, grenades and a few tanks; others only bayonets or knives lashed to poles. The Japanese commanders themselves did not know exactly how many men they had left: a captured intelligence officer of the 43rd Division first said 1,500, then 3,000. A special board set up by Spruance estimated the number of attackers at 2,500–3,000, and the commander of the 27th Division, Major General George Griner, at no fewer than 3,000. Estimates reaching 4,000–4,300 are based on the later body count.

In the path of the attack stood two battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment of the 27th Division – the 1st Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien and the 2nd Battalion under Major McCarthy. On the evening of 6 July they had halted on the plain by the coast, south of Makunsha, and dug in within a common perimeter. Between them and the 3rd Battalion of the same regiment, which stood on the high ground above a ravine the Americans called Harakiri Gulch, yawned a gap. The battalion commanders asked for reserves to close it, but neither regimental nor divisional headquarters had any.

At around four in the morning of 7 July the Japanese mass moved south from Makunsha, between the shore and the foot of the cliffs. Some advanced along the track of the narrow-gauge sugar-cane railway, some struck the 3rd Battalion in the ravine, and the rest flowed through the gap without meeting resistance. Shortly before five the main wave hit the perimeter of the two battalions of the 105th Regiment. After some twenty-five minutes of hand-to-hand fighting the positions were overrun. “It was like the stampede scene in the old Western movies. We were the cameramen,” recalled McCarthy, one of the few surviving officers. “They just kept coming and coming. It didn’t make any difference if you shot one – five more would take his place.”

The survivors fell back into the ruins of the village of Tanapag, where at around eight McCarthy and other officers organised a new perimeter. For several hours they held out there with no communication with the rear, no water and dwindling ammunition, surrounded by Japanese infiltrating between the houses. Some of the men, fired on by their own artillery, threw themselves into the sea and swam out to the reefs, where American boats picked them up. The last soldiers did not leave the encirclement until around ten at night. Of the two battalions of the 105th Regiment, 406 men were killed and 512 wounded – nearly 80 per cent of their strength.

The gunners and the relief

The wave that had passed through the gap reached the positions of the 3rd Battalion, 10th Marines – an artillery unit that the day before had set up its howitzers a few hundred metres south-west of Tanapag village. The gunners fired over open sights at very close range at the charging Japanese; H Battery destroyed a Japanese tank, among other targets. In the end the marines of two batteries had to abandon their guns, taking or destroying the breechblocks, and fell back along the railway track to the neighbouring G Battery, where they held out until the afternoon. Meanwhile the 27th Division’s artillery fired as heavily as the proximity of its own retreating soldiers allowed: between 5.15 and 6.15 a.m. three light battalions fired 2,666 rounds into the 105th Regiment’s sector of attack, an average of more than forty a minute.

The Japanese attack lost momentum only at the 105th Regiment’s command post, south of Tanapag. At around 9.20 a.m. Griner ordered the 106th Infantry Regiment into the battle; it began to advance slowly along the railway track and in the afternoon recaptured the abandoned marine guns. A battalion of the 6th Marines was also sent in. Scattered Japanese groups held out in ditches, thickets and ruins until evening. The next day most of the 27th Division’s units were withdrawn into reserve, and the 2nd Marine Division combed the area.

Medals of Honor

For the fighting on 7 July three soldiers of the 105th Regiment were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest American military decoration. Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien, commander of the 1st Battalion, according to survivors fought with a pistol in each hand, and when his ammunition ran out, badly wounded, he manned a heavy machine gun until he was killed. Sergeant Thomas Baker of A Company, wounded, refused evacuation so as not to endanger the comrades who were trying to carry him, and asked them to leave him with a loaded pistol; his body was later found beside the empty weapon, with eight dead Japanese around him. Both medals were awarded in May 1945.

The third was Captain Ben Salomon, a dentist from Milwaukee, who had volunteered to replace the 2nd Battalion’s wounded surgeon. His aid station was a few dozen metres behind the front line. When the Japanese began to force their way into it, Salomon ordered the wounded to be evacuated and covered their withdrawal with a machine gun. According to the soldiers who found his body a few days later, 98 dead Japanese lay in front of his position – a figure that cannot be verified today. The division commander rejected the recommendation for Salomon’s medal, arguing that as a medical officer wearing a Red Cross armband he should not have fought with a weapon. The case was reopened in the late 1990s, and the medal was not awarded until 2002.

The dispute over the 27th Division

The attack of 7 July became one of the flashpoints of a dispute that divided the US Army and the Marine Corps. As early as 24 June Lieutenant General Holland Smith, commander of the ground forces on Saipan, had relieved the commander of the 27th Division, Major General Ralph Smith, accusing the division of a lack of aggressiveness. After the attack Holland Smith and some Marine officers claimed that the battalions of the 105th Regiment had given way too easily, that there had been fewer Japanese than the Army maintained, and that a large proportion of the dead on the plain had been killed by Marine gunners. The 27th Division’s headquarters replied that its two battalions had borne the main weight of the attack, standing in open ground with a gap they had asked in vain to have closed, and that the corps had refused them the support of Marine tanks. According to some historians, the body count ordered by Griner served precisely this purpose – to show how great a wave had fallen on his men.

The “Smith versus Smith” controversy went on long after the war – in Holland Smith’s memoirs of 1949, in the history of the 27th Division written by its historian Edmund Love, and in the official histories of both services. The US Army’s official history concedes that the battalions’ night-time dispositions were unfortunate, but does not share the charges of cowardice. Many later authors consider that with so many attackers and such a gap in the line no unit could have held its position without losses similar to those suffered by the 105th Regiment.

Place in the war

The attack of 7 July did not change the course of the battle – but it destroyed the last organised Japanese forces on Saipan. Over the next two days the marines reached the northern tip of the island, Marpi Point, and on 9 July Vice Admiral Richmond Turner announced the end of the fighting. In the last days, in the north of the island, hundreds of Japanese civilians took their own lives by throwing themselves from the cliffs or blowing themselves up with grenades.

Saipan was the first place where thousands of American soldiers witnessed gyokusai on such a scale, although the phenomenon was not new: a year earlier the Japanese defence of Attu in the Aleutians had ended in a similar way. Such attacks, combined with the suicides of commanders and the refusal to surrender, convinced the American command that every subsequent island would be defended to the last man. The Japanese in time drew a different conclusion: on Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, instead of mass charges, they conducted a prolonged defence from caves and fortifications, which cost the Americans far more. Nagumo’s death symbolically closed the road the Imperial Navy had travelled since Pearl Harbor, and the loss of Saipan – an island from which B-29 bombers could reach Tokyo – shook Japan so badly that within a couple of weeks the government of General Hideki Tōjō fell.