Battle for Saipan, Part Six
By David H. Lippman
April 2014

You can read Part Five here.

The bizarre reality of the invasion of Saipan fell in the lap of Pvt. Guy Gabaldon, an East Los Angeles native and 10th-grade dropout whose knowledge of Spanish and Japanese from his Nisei neighborhood friends landed him a job as an intelligence scout. Two Spanish priests and a Russian civilian were brought in to his unit’s command post. The priests were teachers in the Catholic school, while the Russian was an exile who had fled Josef Stalin. The priests’ issue: tracking down seven nuns who were trying to stay alive in the hills. The Marines saved six.

Next day, Gabaldon joined Marine scouts, who had discovered a cave full of Japanese troops. The Americans wanted to take them prisoner for their intelligence value. Standing outside the cave entrance, Gabaldon yelled, “You are surrounded. You have no choice but to surrender. I assure you that you will be well-treated. We do not want to kill you.” Two Japanese soldiers charged out, bayonets fixed. Gabaldon fired his carbine’s clip into them, killing both. “They believed that their sabers and a Banzai yell would assure victory,” Gabaldon later said. “I can’t complain, their stupidity made me the owner of many sabers.”

With other Japanese defenders still in the cave, determined to fight, Gabaldon tossed in four grenades, followed by a satchel charge of TNT, then took cover. The explosion was ferocious. Gabaldon then ran into the cave and emptied two clips into the seven remaining occupants. Once they were dead, Gabaldon inspected his bag: the corpses of five soldiers and two women. But each woman had a rifle in her hands and grenades next to her.

At his tactical HQ, Saito, having recovered his composure, studied his maps on the 17th, and determined that he could not hold southern Saipan until the Imperial Navy had steamed up, smashed the American fleet, and relieved the garrison. Nevertheless, Saito was determined to hold the island, slowly retreating, buying time and inflicting casualties.

But his situation was parlous. The Americans were still landing troops and advancing. On the 18th, Holland Smith ordered his three divisions forward to sweep the southern portion of Saipan, to finally take Aslito airfield and enable land-based planes to operate from Saipan. The 165th Infantry Regiment drew the assignment, and went forward with artillery and tank support. At 10 a.m., the troops crossed the airfield, and pronounced it secured 16 minutes later. There was only one Japanese defender, found hiding between the double doors of the control tower. The remaining defenders had withdrawn. The airfield was renamed Conroy Field in honor of Col. Gardiner J. Conroy, who had commanded the 165th in its invasion of Makin and been killed there. The Marines soon renamed it Isely Airfield after the naval aviator who had been shot down over Saipan. The 165th moved on towards Nafutan Ridge, where they came under heavy Japanese fire.

Meanwhile, the 4th Marine Division advanced in the face of intense Japanese machine-gun fire and a sudden counterattack by two tanks. The tanks caused 15 casualties before they were driven off by bazookas and artillery. The division made slow progress, which in turn bogged down the 2nd Marine Division. The 8th Marine Regiment attacked the enemy-infest coconut grove that had proved so bothersome the day before, and captured it, finding for the first time a great many Japanese dead. Until the 18th, the Japanese were removing their dead bodies. The fact that they were leaving them behind showed that the Japanese had more urgent matters to deal with.

Up on Mount Donnay, nurse Shizuko Miura continued to tend grievously wounded Japanese troops. One maggot-covered lieutenant begged Shizuko to send his photograph of his wife back to her when he died. Shizuko assured the lieutenant: “You won’t die. I will surely cure you. And we’ve heard that reinforcements are coming. Then you can return to the homeland. Keep up your spirits!”

That evening, the Japanese command in Tokyo and Saipan both realized their situation was critical. The island had been cut in two and the southern part, including the main airfield, was in American hands. The Japanese troops were withdrawing slowly but steadily under American pressure to previously prepared positions. Thirty-First Army reported to Tokyo: “This is the beginning of our showdown fight,” adding that “we will fight to the last.”

The Emperor himself sent a message back: “Although the front line officers are fighting splendidly, if Saipan is lost, air raids on Tokyo will take place often, therefore you absolutely must hold Saipan.”

That same day the Japanese made their major effort to defeat the U.S. Navy, hurling the Combined Fleet’s aircraft carriers into battle for the first time since 1942. At the Battle of the Philippine Sea, two days of wild air battles saw the Japanese lose 330 aircraft and three carriers, while inflicting trifling losses on Spruance’s ships and planes. The Japanese fleet withdrew from the scene, and Saipan’s defenders were on their own.

The next American land objective was Nafutan Point, a short peninsula dominated by a high craggy ridge and Mount Nafutan, which stood 407 feet high. The Japanese defenders numbered about 1,050 men from the remnants of the 317th Independent Infantry Battalion and the 47th Independent Mixed Brigade, along with some other stragglers. Behind them were frightened Japanese civilians. In command was Capt. Sasaki, boss of the 317th.

The 27th Division was given the job of clearing out Nafutan Point, and they came under heavy fire from Japanese pillboxes. The 105th Infantry tried to place shaped charges against the pillboxes to blast them open, but the fire was too heavy. The Americans tried outflanking the enemy, struggling through an exploding Japanese artillery dump. The 165th struggled through a slope made up of a coral formation studded with sharp rocks, pocketed with holes, deep canyons, crevasses, and caves, overgrown with vines, small trees, and bushes.

Fortunately, the natural defenses were tougher than the Japanese. The Americans sent out appeals over a loudspeaker system to persuade the isolated Japanese to surrender, but the Japanese ignored them. After dark, the Japanese tried a 20-man counterattack, which was broken up. A group of 20 to 30 civilians stumbled into an American position, and all were killed. While the Japanese were ferocious enough, they simply lacked enough men and guns to slow down the American advance, so they kept retreating northward.

On June 20, Ralph Smith’s GIs continued to struggle to gain Nafutan Point, using smoke screens to conceal their flanking movements. When the 1st Battalion of the 105th Infantry came under Japanese fire from snipers in a town, Lt. Col. William O’Brien, commanding the battalion, ordered the settlement burned down, with tanks, anti-tank guns, and flamethrowers doing the job. With artillery and tank support, the GIs steadily squeezed the Japanese, suffering light casualties: one man dead in the 105th and six in the 165th. With two regiments of the 27th engaged, the division’s third regiment, the 106th, finally came ashore, to serve as corps reserve.

Meanwhile, the two Marine divisions pivoted on the invasion beaches, to prep for the big drive to clear the island from south to north. Marine Capt. John A. Magruder watched Navy medics tenderly load corpses into a truck and went to see if there was anyone he knew. There was: a young replacement who had been exuberant when he reached the front. A yellow paperback book stuck out of his back pocket, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by actress Cornelia Otis Skinner and journalist Emily Kimbrough – a New York Times 1943 best-selling memoir of the pair’s 1920s post-university grand tour of Europe.

Sgt. Yamauchi was touring the mountains of Saipan while this was going on. Detached from his unit, he and two pals wandered around for five days, looking for friendly faces. He found a couple of men, and one said, “Imperial military men cannot just act on their own forever. Our company must be assembling somewhere. Let’s go find them.” On the night of the 20th, they met up with Lance Cpl. Omatsu, a squad leader, who had injured his palm and couldn’t shoot his rifle. He was headed for a field hospital, so Yamauchi and his pals joined him. They found the hospital was just a space on the ground with wounded men laid out. Among them was Lt. Kitahama, who told them that their 136th Regiment was digging in on the east coast of Saipan, on the other side of the 400-meter-tall Mt. Happocho. Yamauchi and his crew set out to join them, to find the 3,500-strong regiment was down to about 400 men, and all of his company’s officers were dead – Warrant Officer Furui had taken command of his company. Yamauchi was assigned as “liaison sergeant” to regimental headquarters.

On the 21st, the 27th continued to attack Nafutan Point. 3rd/105th found its advance held up by enfilade fire from a Japanese-held cave. The Americans sent in light tanks, which hurled 37mm shells at the cave. The Americans also tried to persuade the remaining Japanese to surrender, using loudspeakers, to no avail.

At 9:30 a.m., the 1st/105th moved forward slowly, without opposition, but at 12:55 p.m. it came under heavy mortar and automatic weapons fire, in open terrain. The GIs withdrew and summoned bigger tanks. The Shermans arrived at 3 p.m., buttoned their hatches, and clanked off – in the wrong direction. They reversed their course, and headed back towards the Americans, firing at their own troops. Col. O’Brien ran into the fire, crawled up on the turret of the first tank he met, and banged on it with its pistol butt. The tank commander opened the hatch and got the point. With O’Brien on top of the tank turret, the Americans advanced together, silencing the Japanese opposition.

On the 27th’s extreme left, the fresh 2nd/105th, under Lt. Col. Leslie M. Jensen, went into the attack in extremely difficult terrain, facing the nose of Mount Natufan, a sheer cliff that split the battalion front like the bow of a ship. The cliff was only 30 feet high, but the approach to it was a steep slope through a canefield’s stubble, which lacked cover.

The battalion jumped off on schedule at 9:30 a.m., and was immediately hit by the usual small arms, machine-gun, and mortar fire. The Americans assaulted the cliff, and reached its top, but couldn’t hold on. Jensen called for rations, water, and artillery, which fired at point-blank range. Combined with a flanking attack, the Americans ultimately forced the Japanese to withdraw.

A shorter version of this appeared in the February 2014 issue of WW2 History magazine, published by Sovereign Media, and is used with permission.

David H. Lippman, an award-winning journalist and graduate of the New School for Social Research, has written many magazine articles about World War II. He currently works as a public information officer for the city of Newark, N.J. We're always pleased to add his work to our Daily Content.