Island Infernos by John C. McManus

Author:John C. McManus [McManus, John C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

✭

On June 15, D-day, the bombardment began at 0530. To Sergeant Yamauchi, staring with bulging eyes at the American ships, the enemy fleet looked like “a large city had appeared offshore. When I saw that, I didn’t even have the strength to stand up.” Vice Admiral Turner had carefully divided Saipan and neighboring Tinian into seven firing sectors and organized his bombardment ships to shell targets inside these tightly prepared windows. For an hour and a half, they showered their targets with a variety of ordnance, ranging from the five-inch shells of destroyers to sixteen-inch projectiles from USS Maryland’s main guns, a breathtaking spectacle of firepower. “There are few things prettier than a naval bombardment, provided one is on the sending not the receiving end and (as in this case) has lost all feeling of compassion for the human victims,” Morison, the naval historian, wrote sagely. “Nearby ships belch great clouds of saffron smoke with a mighty roar. Distant ones are inaudible, but their flashes of gunfire leap out like the angry flick of a snake’s tongue.” Sergeant David Dempsey, a Marine Corps combat correspondent, watched “the shells bite into the coral sand and shred the palm trees that lined the shore.” Explosions pulverized buildings in Garapan and Charan Kanoa, a sugar mill town located in the heart of the 4th Marine Division landing area. Flames raged all over the island. Mount Topatchau boiled with so many fires as to obscure it with smoke. The ships ceased firing and yielded to air strikes from 0700 to 0800. As Dempsey watched, transfixed, the planes “peeled off, and plummeted savagely down, dropping their bombs a few hundred feet from the ground. As they began their climb the explosions threw bursts of fire, rubble and a talcum-fine dust into the air. In a few minutes the beach was obscured.”

When the planes finished, the ships resumed their fire against beach targets while hundreds of LVTs, all packed with Marines, headed for the coast. A gray-brown pall of smoke and dust had settled over Saipan like a veil. “The flames are miles high,” Seaman William Schmidt, a crewman aboard LST 120, later wrote to his parents, with a touch of exaggeration. “It’s a reassuring sight.” On the receiving end, Japanese defenders clustered into trenches, pillboxes, dugouts, bunkers, caves, and holes to weather the firepower storm as best they could. “There was no way of coping with the explosions,” Private Matsuya of the 9th Tank Regiment noted in his diary. “We could do nothing but wait for them to stop.” Another soldier described the shelling as “too terrible for words” but took solace in the notion that he would “die in true Samurai style.” In hopes of soothing shattered nerves, one young naval officer took solace in alcohol. “There is something indescribable about a shot of liquor during a bombardment,” he told his diary with a surreal honesty that might have been funny under less dangerous circumstances. Sergeant Kawaguchi’s medical unit set up an aid station at a Shinto shrine, where they began to care for men who were wounded by the shells.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.