June 19th, 1944. USS Lexington
The radioman sits, sweating into his earphones.
Contrary to rumours on Saipan, the Navy had not abandoned the Marines.
They'd received reports of carriers closing in.
A Japanese fleet, coming to smash the Navy's task force
and strand the troops ashore.
A wave of dive-bombers is headed toward Lexington.
Hellcat fighters are scrambling to intercept.
The radioman waits for contact.
A scream in his earphones.
"Scratch one bomber!" a pilot crows.
More screams. Men yip, cheer, and count kills.
"Splash number six!" the same pilot calls.
He's become an ace in eight minutes.
And he's not the only one.
By the end of the day,
the Hellcats have destroyed the core of Japan's air power in the Pacific.
Officially this is the Battle of the Philippine Sea,
but the pilots will call it the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.
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It was a massacre.
Within two days, the Japanese 1st Mobile Fleet lost three carriers
to American aircraft and submarines, and nearly all of their veteran pilots.
The survivors turned back toward Okinawa,
their mission to relieve Saipan a failure.
The threat at sea was over, but on land, the battle raged.
The Japanese defenders were tenacious, and US progress slow.
With the tank offensive a failure and their rescue fleet smashed,
Lieutenant-General Saito ordered troops to withdraw inland
and defend every position to the death,
using terrain to their advantage.
Marines die in valley ambushes, clearing out caves, flushing pillboxes
and fighting room-to-room in refinery towns.
Japanese troops use sugarcane fields to conceal movements and spring attacks.
Marines respond by torching the fields.
US soldiers begin to christen the terrain with macabre nicknames
like Bloody Run and Purple Heart Ridge.
Ashore since the second day of the invasion,
on 22nd June the US Army's 27th Infantry Division
begins battering its way through "Death Valley",
a deep depression where Japanese troops hold the ridges.
Furious at their lack of progress, after five days
the invasion's commander, Marine General Holland "Howlin' Mad" Smith,
fires the Army commander and pushes them on,
regardless of mounting casualties.
As the Saipan invasion, estimated to take three days
drags on into the second week,
both American and Japanese forces become more ruthless.
Governments on both sides bombarded their troops
with propaganda dehumanizing the enemy.
Japanese commanders describe Americans
as bloodthirsty devils and barbarians.
American officers refer to the Japanese with racial slurs
and speak in terms of extermination.
There's little mercy.
Japanese military ethos stigmatizes surrender,
and commanders spread rumours that Americans torture and eat prisoners.
Americans, for their part,
know about the death marches and executions in the Philippines.
As a result, surrender is both rarely offered and rarely accepted.
Tragically, civilians sheltering in caves and fortifications
are often caught in the middle of combat.
Told that Americans will torture them if they're captured,
hundreds instead decide to take their own lives,
jumping off cliffs en masse.
American translators beg via bullhorn to stop,
saying that they've set up refugee camps, but it's no use.
In some minds, it's evidence that the Japanese cannot be reasoned with.
But one man thinks he can get through.
Marine scout Guy Gabaldon had a unique background.
Things had been rough growing up as a Mexican-American kid in Los Angeles,
but when things hit bottom,
a school friend named Lane Nakano had brought him home.
Soon he was living with the Nakanos, learning Japanese.
They'd practically raised him.
Now, his adopted family was in an internment camp
and Lane was in Europe, fighting with the 442nd.
Gabaldon can't believe that these enemies
are as unthinking and inhuman as his officers claim.
So one night, on guard duty, he walks into the jungle alone.
He returns that morning with two Japanese soldiers
that he'd convinced to surrender.
His commander is furious. Only an idiot would desert his post like that.
As punishment, he gives Gabaldon another overnight shift.
That night, Gabaldon drops his rifle and walks off again.
This time he comes back with fifty people, soldiers and civilians.
This time, instead of punishing him, the commander makes it Gabaldon's new job.
So night after night, Gabaldon crawls into enemy territory
armed with nothing but candy, food, his voice,
and a sack of grenades in case of emergency.
He walks up to campfires and makes friends.
Goes into caves. And night after night he brings back more people.
Guy Gabaldon, the Pied Piper of Saipan,
convinced over a thousand soldiers and civilians to surrender to US forces.
In doing so, he almost certainly saved their lives.
Because Lieutenant-General Saito was planning a Gyokusai.
Saito's forces have reached a critical point.
His troops are foraging leaves and snails for sustenance.
Medicine and ammunition are nearly gone.
And he's running out of men. There are only 7,000 left.
And thanks to the US Navy, there would be no rescue.
Saito had ordered Banzai charges since the first day of the invasion,
but a Gyokusai was different.
It came directly from the Emperor, a mandate for every man,
even the wounded and unarmed, to attack without fear.
He gives the order by radio. Those too injured to fight will commit suicide.
Anyone left has a simple directive:
Attack before dawn. Kill seven Americans before you fall.
He swears to advance with them
and leave his bones on Saipan, the bulwark of the Pacific.
But despite his message, Saito will not advance.
He is too old, too valuable if taken alive.
Instead, he eats a meal of crabmeat and sake
with his stranded friend, Admiral Nagumo,
who'd overseen the Pearl Harbor Attack.
Afterword, both commit suicide.
As Saito and Nagumo share their final meal,
the rank-and-file troops drink their last supplies of sake and beer
and talk about what tomorrow will bring.
There's no hope of success, but dying in glory
is better than huddling in caves and waiting for the flamethrowers.
Near dawn, they pick up anything they can find:
rifles, grenades, knives, pistols, swords.
Some carry makeshift spears made from bamboo and bayonets.
Then they charge American lines in the largest, and final, Banzai attack of the war.
Machine gun bullets rip through them.
Those without weapons snatch them from dying comrades.
They break over the 27th Infantry Division's front line
and rush through the gaps between battalions.
So many enemies are rushing the American line, there's no need to aim.
Troops can fire blind and still hit the charging men.
Lieutenant-Colonel William O'Brien, the commander of the 27th's 1st Battalion,
105th Regiment, walks up and down,
shouting for his men to hold, firing a colt in each hand.
Wounded and out of ammunition, he's last seen manning a Jeep's machine gun.
When they find his body the next day,
it's discovered that he'd died, out of ammunition,
defending himself with a Japanese saber.
They've broken the perimeter, two battalions of the 27th are overrun.
Behind the lines, Captain Ben Salomon, a dentist at home,
now regimental surgeon, is at his aid station,
trying to stop wounded men from bleeding to death.
He hears a shout,
and turns to see a Japanese soldier bayoneting one of his patients.
Though not trained for combat, he shoots the soldier
and charges into combat with the four Japanese troops following him.
He yells to evacuate.
As his patients limp out, Salomon slides into a foxhole.
There's a machine gun there. The crew are dead.
He holds the machine gun nest until he's overrun,
stalling the assault long enough for his patients to escape.
But not all the wounded make it.
When two men die trying to carry Sergeant Thomas Baker to the rear,
he refuses to be moved again.
The veteran, known for courage under fire,
asks only to be propped up against a tree with a cigarette and a pistol.
He will be found there later, gun empty,
cigarette burned out, surrounded by enemy dead.
O'Brien, Salomon, and Baker would never go home.
Their families receive the Medal of Honor instead.
Swamped and nearly out of ammunition,
parts of the 27th Infantry begin rushing backward, fighting as they run.
Cooks and clerks at HQ sections in the rear
grab rifles to hold pockets of territory, islands in a bloody stream.
Indeed, the Japanese have finally achieved their aim
of driving the Americans into the sea.
Around seventy five soldiers take to the water,
swimming out to a reef a hundred yards offshore for safety.
Others establish thin secondary perimeters on the beach
and hold until reinforcements clear the sector.
The Gyokusai was over.
But it achieved its aim of shock and terror.
The attack had nearly wiped out two US Army battalions.
That morning the two battalions had a combined strength of 1,107 men.
By nightfall, four hundred were dead and five hundred wounded.
An 80% casualty rate from just one attack.
But over four thousand Japanese soldiers had died in the desperate assault.
It was over.
Surveying the carnage, Captain Ōba Sakae
knew Japanese resistance on Saipan was broken.
Fearing for his medical company and the island's civilians,
he scratched together a group of survivors and took to the mountains.
They remained there, fighting a guerilla war,
until his commander convinced him to surrender,
three months after the war ended.
Victory on Saipan had immediate consequences.
General Tōjō Hideki resigned as Prime Minister, and the Japanese government
accepted that victory was no longer possible.
But they fought on, hoping to prevent an invasion of the homeland
and removal of the Emperor.
With Saipan taken,
Americans secured the rest of the Marianas chain,
taking Tinian, Guam and their valuable airstrips.
When American bombers flattened Japanese cities and burned Tokyo,
they would do so from airfields in the Marianas.
And one year after the fighting concluded on Saipan,
a lone B-29 bomber lifted off from Tinian airfield.
Overnight, MPs had kept troops away from the aircraft
and its odd, specially-built loading pit.
The B-29 hit its rendezvous point, then turned toward Hiroshima.
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