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A CLOSE ENCOUNTER: The Marine Landing on Tinian
by Richard Harwood
Jig Day: Feint and Landing
The first troop ships moved out of Saipan's Charan
Kanoa harbor at 0330, 24 July. They were the transports Knox,
Calvert, Fuller, Bell, Heywood, and John Land. They were
carrying the 2d and 8th Marines (infantry regiments) of the 2d Marine
Division on a mission of deception that turned out to be far bloodier
than the White Beach landings and far bloodier than anyone had
anticipated. They had a muscular escort—the battleship
Colorado, the light cruiser Cleveland, and the destroyers
Ramey, Norman Scott, Wadleigh, and Monssen.
The convoy moved into Sunharon Harbor opposite Tinian
Town just before dawn. A few minutes after 0600, the Calvert
began lowering its landing craft and by 0630 all 22 of its boats were in
the water. Marines climbed down the cargo nets. Within a half hour, 244
Navy and Army planes began strafing and bombing runs paying particular
attention to Tinian Town. Shells and rockets from battleships, heavy and
light cruisers, destroyers, and 30 gunboats saturated the beaches. The
massed artillery battalions on southern Saipan thundered in with their
105s and 155s.
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After a half-hour of this furious bombardment, the
LCVPs (landing craft, vehicle and personnel) from Calvert began
their run toward the beach at Tinian Town, receiving heavy artillery and
mortar fire from the shore. Admiral Hill, seeking to avoid casualties,
ordered the boats to withdraw and reform. A second run started and
immediately drew fire from the shore; several boats were sprayed with
shell fragments. But they continued on to within 400 yards of the beach
before turning back.
While the small boats engaged in this maneuver, the
battleship Colorado came under fire at a range of 3,200 yards
from two 6-inch naval guns near Tinian Town, guns that had gone
undetected during the weeks of preinvasion surveillance and preparatory
fires. Within 15 minutes, the Japanese gunners scored 22 direct hits on
Colorado and six direct hits on the destroyer Norman
Scott, which was attempting to protect the battleship. Casualties
among the crews and Marine detachments on the two ships were heavy: 62
killed and 223 wounded. Ten Marines were among the dead, 31 were among
the wounded. Colorado was through for the day and limped off back
to Saipan. The Japanese battery survived for four more days until
destroyed by the battleship Tennessee.
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Napalm: Something New in the Arsenal
Early in 1944, Army Air Corps personnel at Eglin Air
Force base near Fort Walton Beach, Florida invented a new weapon. It was
a "fire bomb," first used in combat during the Tinian campaign. The
ingredients were diesel oil, gasoline, and a metallic salt from the
naptha used in the manufacture of soap. Mixed with petroleum fuels,
the salt created an incendiary jelly that clung to any surface and
burned with an extremely hot flame. The concoction was called "napalm."
It could be dropped in wing or belly tanks attached to the underside of
an aircraft and was fired by an igniter on contact with the ground.
On 19 July, five days before the Tinian landing,
Lieutenant Commander Louis W. Wang, USN, arrived at Saipan carrying a
small supply of the "napalm" powder and a film made at Eglin
demonstrating the potency of the bomb. It showed P-47s making low-level
drops after diving from 2,000 feet.
The demonstration film so impressed Admiral Harry
Hill and Major General Harry Schmidt that Hill immediately radioed
Admiral Chester Nimitz in Hawaii, requesting 8,599 pounds of the powder.
They also ordered trial raids on Tinian by P-47 pilots of the Army's
318th Air Group, using powder and detonators already on hand. These
trials were not particularly impressive. Their purpose was to burn off
wooded areas that had previously resisted white phosphorous and
thermite. The "napalm" scorched the trees but left the foliage only
partially burned. One problem was the wood itself—a virtually
indestructible type of ironwood. Another was the napalm mixture. Wang
had brought with him the wrong formula. "We tried using Jap aviation
gasoline, according to Colonel Lewis M. Sanders, commander of the
fighter group, "but that gave too much fire effect. Then we tried Jap
motor gas and oil, with the napalm powder, and it was quite
successful."
The P-47 pilots were uncomfortable with napalm
missions. They dropped their tanks at extremely low altitudes—50
feet in some cases—and were highly vulnerable to ground fire. They
were also unimpressed with the efficiency of these "fire bombs"; much of
their incendiary effect was wasted in excessive upward flash. Napalm
also had a very short burning time—less than two minutes.
Nevertheless, 147 "fire bombs" were used during the
Tinian operation, 91 of them containing the napalm mixture. They were
most effective in clearing cane fields. As Major General Clifton B.
Cates, the 4th Division commander, later recalled: "The first morning
they put it down, I went up to the front line and those planes came in
over our heads it seemed to me like about a hundred feet in the air . .
. [They] let go their napalm bombs right over our heads . . . maybe two
or three hundred yards in front of us. It was a very devastating thing
and particularly to the morale of the Japanese . . . . I didn't feel too
comfortable sitting up there ... I figured that some of them might drop
short."
Each bomb cleared an area approximately 75 by 200
feet and, in some cases, left behind the charred bodies of Japanese
troops. The Marines were impressed. Infantry commanders sought napalm
for their flamethrower tanks. It was used widely in 1944 in support of
ground troops in the Philippines. On one operation on Luzon, 238
fighters saturated an area with napalm: "The usually stoic [Japanese],"
an Air Force historian recorded, "seemingly lost all caution and fled
into the open, [becoming] easy targets for other forms of attack."
Napalm was used effectively in the fire bombing of
Japanese cities. It was also used in preinvasion efforts to soften up
the defenses of Iwo Jima. Beginning on 31 January 1945, Liberator
bombers of the Seventh Air Force began 16 days of daytime sorties
against the island in which 602 tons of bombs were dropped and 1,111
drums of napalm were used in an unproductive effort to burn off
camouflage from defensive positions and gun emplacements. A Marine
intelligence officer is quoted in the official Air Force history of
operations over Iwo Jima as saying that "the chief effect of the long
bombardment of Iwo was to cause the enemy to build more elaborate
underground defenses.
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The losses sustained by the two ships exceeded those
suffered that day by the Marine landing force on the northwestern
beaches. But the feint served its purpose. It froze in place around
Tinian Town a whole battalion of the 50th Infantry Regiment and
various elements of the 56th Naval Guard Force. And it convinced
the Japanese commander, Colonel Kiyochi Ogata, that he had thwarted an
invasion. His message to Tokyo described how his forces had repelled 100
landing barges.
These "barges" were reloaded on the Calvert at
1000 and the convoy steamed north to the White Beaches where 4th
Division troops had landed after a mishap in their planning. An
underwater demolition team using floats carrying explosives swam to
White Beach 2 shortly before dawn to blast away boulders and destroy
beach mines. The mission failed because of a squall. The floats
scattered, the explosives were lost and a few hours later, Marines paid
a price for this aborted mission.
To compensate for the failure of the UDT team, fire
support ships lying off the White Beaches—the battleships
California and Tennessee, the heavy cruiser
Louisville, and four destroyers—blasted away at the landing
areas. Air strikes were then ordered at about 0630 and observers claimed
that five of the 14 known beach mines had been destroyed. A battery of
155mm "Long Tom" guns on Saipan fired smokeshells at the Japanese
command post on Mount Lasso and also laid smoke in the woods and on the
bluffs just beyond the beaches to obstruct Japanese observation.
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