June, 1944. D-Day.
The ramp drops, signalling the start of an invasion
that will determine the fate of the war.
In the next hour, 8,000 American troops will hit the beach.
Many in the first wave will die.
But when the ramp drops, what emerges isn't an infantry platoon,
it's a line of amphibious tanks.
And the target of this D-Day isn't Normandy, it's Saipan.
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An engine roars.
An amphibious vehicle lurches down the ramp and drops into the sea,
chugging forward.
It's slow and heavy, this converted transport.
Light armour plates weigh it down,
and a stubby 75mm cannon thrusts out of its open-topped turret.
The crew looks back to see a line of their fellow landing vehicles, LVTs,
plunging into the sea each time a wave swells beneath the landing ship.
One misjudges and drives into a wave trough.
It drops twenty feet and splashes down like a brick, sunk with all hands.
The crew winces. Each vehicle has 24 men aboard.
The Marines have nicknamed them amtracs, "amphibious tractors".
Cannon-armed, hardened amtracs like the one this crew drives are an amtank.
The amtank plows toward Saipan, churning the rough water.
The crew sees flashes on the mountain, Japanese artillery.
Shells throw waterspouts twenty feet high.
An LVT behind them disintegrates.
"Hold on!" the driver screams.
He downshifts.
Treads bite coral and the amtank lurches up on the reef.
For a heart-stopping moment it feels like they'll go over backward,
but then they're onto the shelf, moving faster but exposed.
Mortars drop around them. Machine gun bullets ping the front armour.
The amtank next to them explodes. Then they drop into the calm lagoon.
The crew clenches their teeth,
thinking of what's ahead for the Marines in the transport behind.
First, the beach, then the brush,
then the towns, sugarcane fields and caves.
Only then could they climb that mountain and silence the artillery.
The fighting was expected to be so close, some Marines were carrying shotguns.
The amtrac transports are supposed to advance a thousand yards inland today.
But for that to happen,
the lead amtanks need to assault the enemy emplacements on the beach.
They begin to fire.
The crew hears the shifting grind of sand.
The amtank lurches onto the shore and up to the tree line.
Machine gun bullets ping its turret armour and zip through the hull.
The gunner rotates the turret and answers with a shell, cracking the pillbox open.
He glimpses a Japanese light tank through the trees,
then the nose of the amtank plunges forward.
Stuck, its rear in the air. An anti-tank ditch.
The crew grabs their rifles and bails,
from now on, they're infantry.
For the first time in the war, Americans have landed on Japanese soil.
This battle would decide the fate of the Pacific War.
That's what they'd been told in their briefing. And it was no lie.
Saipan was the most heavily fortified of the Northern Mariana Islands,
and had been Japanese territory since 1919.
But it wasn't the island's sugarcane industry America was after.
It was their airfields.
Because a B-29 Superfortress launched from Saipan
could strike the Japanese homeland,
opening it to the kind of sustained strategic bombing
that was currently pounding Germany.
And so, the US had sent an enormous fleet to invade an island
that was only twelve miles long and five across.
And on the other side of the beaches
concealed in brush, emplacements, and caves
the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy
knew exactly why these Americans had come.
Their commander, Lieutenant General Saito Yoshitsugu, had made that clear.
Saipan was home soil for them, for some, quite literally.
Soldiers that spent time there tended to marry into the Japanese settler families.
And even those whose families lay far away in Japan
knew that this battle was to defend their loved ones from American bombs.
But they're under-strengthed and under-equipped.
American submarines had sunk whole convoys full of reinforcements, weapons,
and construction materials meant to harden Saipan.
But that was too late to worry about now.
Now their plan is to attack.
Pound these Marines with artillery,
then counterattack and push them into the sea.
If that failed, they would go inland and defend every inch of ground to the death.
The 2nd Marine Division is doing badly.
Japanese artillery had waited until the Marines,
disordered by currents and incoming fire,
had stacked up on the congested shore before opening up.
Their thin-skinned amtracs have turned into easy targets,
and some abandoned them before even reaching shore.
Units are disoriented and mixed together.
Japanese snipers kill officers left and right.
By the end of the day,
five of the seven battalions in the 2nd Marines have lost their commander.
Some units suffer 35% casualties.
Swamped in blood, flying sand, and burning tanks,
Marines form ad-hoc fireteams
to push forward into the machine gun and sniper fire.
They scratch foxholes in the sand to shield themselves from mortars.
Between them, amtanks duel with Japanese Type-95s.
Then the counter-thrust hits their lines.
Down the coast, the 4th Marines are doing better.
Their landings haven't stacked up
and amtracs are able to push hundreds of yards inland.
Some stop to evacuate native Chamorro Islanders.
But the narrow roads force the amtracs and amtanks to drive single-file,
easy prey for artillery, tanks and mortars.
Lines of burning amtracs choke the roads as they make their way
toward the sugar-refining town of Charan Kanoa.
By nightfall, it's clear no one will make their first-day objective.
The Marines have taken over 2,000 casualties by sundown.
Over twenty amtracs have gone down in the assault,
with one armoured platoon suffering 40% losses.
The Marines begin a fitful night,
each two-man foxhole team taking turns napping
while the other watches for the black-painted infiltrators
that sometimes slip behind the lines with knives.
They're awakened by a scream: "Banzai! Banzai!"
General Saito's counterattack has arrived.
Soldiers charge out of the darkness, waving swords,
and firing pistols and submachine guns.
Some leap into Marine foxholes, guns blazing and bayonets fixed.
Japanese tanks rev toward the beachhead.
Machine gunners decimate the incoming attackers.
The USS California, wounded at Pearl Harbor, drops artillery in support.
The Marines repulse the charge under the white glow of naval star shells.
Seven hundred Japanese soldiers die in the determined, but futile, assault.
With that, D-Day ended on Saipan.
But despite the brutality of the first day's fighting,
20,000 Marines are now ashore. Some of them are Codetalkers,
Navajo radiomen, recruited off the reservations,
who speak an unbreakable cipher based on their own language.
Throughout the battle they'll help direct naval gunfire and relay secret orders.
And crucially, the Shermans arrive.
Throughout the second day, the tanks pushed forward,
neutralizing artillery emplacements and machine guns,
though not without losses. When one Sherman was immobilized,
its commander, Gunnery Sergeant Robert McCard, remained inside, directing fire.
Nearly overrun, he ordered his crew to evacuate.
He lobbed grenades to cover their retreat,
then dismounted with the tank's machinegun
to hold off the oncoming attack.
He received a posthumous Medal of Honor.
By the end of Day Two, there had been hard progress.
And the exhausted Americans settled in for another watchful night.
Then at 0330, the Marines heard engines.
The men of the Imperial Japanese Army's 9th Tank Regiment
race down from the foothills of the mountain.
They've received an order from Tokyo:
the fate of the Japanese Empire rests in their hands.
They must destroy the enemy.
Their commander has promised to defend this bulwark of the Pacific
if it costs ten-thousand deaths.
And so the 9th Regiment has scratched up every tank it can find
to drive a wedge in the American beachhead.
Thirty-seven tanks, Type-97 mediums in the lead,
Type 95s follow.
Infantry squads ride on their backs and charge behind.
They power forward into US machinegun and artillery fire,
running directly over Marine foxholes and in among their lines.
But the 6th Marines are ready.
They'd survived a tank assault the night before.
Fearing it would happen again, they'd requested backup.
Shermans and halftracks surge forward to meet the attack.
Cannons light the night, but the infantry will decide this battle.
As the first Type 97 runs over a Marine foxhole,
the men inside duck as it passes overhead,
then emerge with the long tube of a bazooka.
They put a round into its weak rear armour.
When it slews to a stop, flaming, they hunt for another target.
Marine bazookas fire point-blank, holing tanks with each round.
The line descends into anarchy as armour, infantry, and artillery
fight a 360-degree brawl,
lit by the fires of burning vehicles.
And as each wave of tanks goes down, more emerge from the shadows.
Confused by the smoke and swirl of combat,
Japanese crews keep opening their hatches to get their bearings.
When they do, Marines leap onto the tanks,
shooting the exposed men
and shoving incendiary grenades into the open hatches.
Within 45 minutes, the 6th Marines have destroyed twenty-four tanks,
with five others falling to neighbouring units. As the sun begins to rise,
they realise that they've just stopped the largest Japanese tank assault of the war,
and wiped out the majority of Imperial armour on Saipan.
But there was no celebration.
The next morning the Marines pushed forward again,
through waist-deep swamps and cane fields.
They entered the shell-wrecked town of Charan Kanoa,
fighting house-to-house, shotgun against bayonet.
And the next morning, they looked back to find an empty ocean.
The Navy was gone.
Rumors spread that the fleet had abandoned them.
Now it was just two armies fighting chest-to-chest,
on an island five miles wide.
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