CHAPTER 1

Guam, July 1944: Amphibious Combat Against a Self-Destructive Enemy

W-Day

THE UNDERWATER DEMOLITION TEAMS (UDTS) went in first. Their job was to blow holes through the coral reefs that served as a natural barrier for the American invasion force at Guam. With that accomplished, their next mission was to destroy obstacles and mines on the chosen landing beaches, and they were to do this in plain view of the Japanese defenders who sat in pillboxes, buildings, and bunkers, overlooking the beaches. Only a smokescreen and some covering fire from ships offshore would shield the Underwater Demolition Teams. Superb swimmers, trained explosives experts, and possessed of an adventurer’s mentality, these intrepid souls were the ancestors of U.S. Navy SEALs. For nearly a week before the invasion, they swept the area, paddling or swimming ashore, setting explosive charges, scouting enemy positions. They were seldom molested by the Japanese, who were often too busy taking shelter from naval gunfire to deal with the UDTs. Sometimes, the Japanese were just plain clueless, exhibiting a self-destructive penchant that was to plague their defense of Guam like a veritable millstone around the neck. One group of Japanese soldiers was practically within spitting distance of a demolition team but did not fire a shot. “No one gave us orders to shoot,” one of them later explained to his American captors. In the days ahead, of course, most of his countrymen would resist their American enemies much more forcefully, but always within the context of a deeply flawed plan that played to American strengths.

By the eve of the July 21 invasion (code-named W-day by the commanders), the teams had accomplished all their missions with the loss of one man killed. They had cleared paths through the reefs, negating palm log barriers filled with coral cement, wire cable, and four-foot-high wire cages also filled with coral cement. They had also blown up, mainly with hand-placed charges, nearly one thousand obstacles on the beaches. They even had time to leave behind a nice message for their Marine brothers who would soon hit the beach. They nailed a large sign to a tree that read: “Welcome Marines! USO that way!” Rear Admiral Richard Conolly, commander of Task Force 53, whose responsibility was to transport, land, and support the invasion troops, later wrote that none of this would have been possible without the work of the UDTs and their “successfully prosecuted clearance operations.” The only downside was that the UDTs, through the sheer weight of their efforts, made it quite obvious to the Japanese where the invasion would happen.¹

In July 1944, the Americans wanted Guam for several reasons. It had once been an American colonial possession. The Japanese had seized it in 1941. The population, mainly Chamorros, had always been pro-American but were especially inclined toward the Americans after several years of difficult Japanese occupation. The locals were itching for liberation and the Americans intended to give them just that. Guam, with excellent airfields, anchorages, and hospitals, was a vital stepping-stone to Japan and ultimate victory.

The Americans planned a two-pronged invasion. In the north, the entire 3rd Marine Division, consisting of three infantry regiments and one artillery regiment, plus many attached units, would land between Adelup Point to the north and Asan Point to the south. The 3rd Marine Regiment would hit Red Beach on the left (north) flank. The 21st Marine Regiment would land in the middle at Green Beach. On the right (south) flank, the 9th Marine Regiment would take Blue Beach. The artillerymen would follow in successive waves. A few miles to the south, just below Orote Point—a fingerlike peninsula that jutted into the sea—the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, consisting of the 22nd and 4th Marine Regiments, were to land at Yellow and White Beaches, respectively, near a village called Agat. They would be reinforced by the Army’s 77th Infantry Division, a New York National Guard outfit nicknamed the “Statue of Liberty” Division. All of these ground forces were lumped under the III Marine Amphibious Corps, commanded by Major General Roy Geiger, a judicious, meticulous Marine with an aviation background. The obvious post-invasion plan for all of these units was to push inland, subdue Japanese resistance, and secure the island.²

Aboard the troopships that were cruising a few miles off Guam’s shores in the early hours of July 21, most of the assault force Marines were actually eager to go ashore. Because they had comprised a floating reserve for the previous invasion of Saipan, they had been cooped up aboard their cramped, hot, austere ships nearly every day since the middle of June. Enlisted men slept belowdecks in cramped bunks stacked from the floor to the ceiling. The bunks inevitably sagged under the weight of their occupants. Only a few inches separated a man’s nose from the hindquarters of the Marine above him. Showers were of the saltwater variety, making true cleanliness a veritable impossibility. The heads were usually crowded. Sometimes toilets overflowed, spilling a nauseating brew of salt water and human waste that flowed from the head into adjacent areas, including sometimes troop quarters. Navy chow was pretty good but, on most of the troopships, meals were only served in the galley twice a day. One ship was permeated with the stench of rotting potatoes in the galley “spud locker.” Officers and sergeants put their Marines through physical training each day, but the fitness level of the men was bound to taper off in such conditions. Men passed the time by playing cards, writing letters, conversing with their buddies, or just plain thinking in solitude. Tempers flared and morale declined. “We were fighting each other,” Private First Class William Morgan, a rifleman in the 3rd Marine Regiment, recalled. “We’d have fought hell itself . . . to get off that damned ship.”³

Shrouded in inky darkness, the vast invasion armada settled into place off Guam’s western shores. Admiral Conolly had amassed a powerful task force consisting of six battleships, six cruisers, seven destroyers, plus a dizzying array of aircraft carriers, submarines, support vessels, and troopships. At 0200, loudspeakers came to life aboard the troopships: “Now hear this, reveille, chow down for troops!” Nervous young Marines crowded into galleys, inching their way through steaming chow lines. On most ships, navy cooks served the traditional invasion fare of steak, eggs, biscuits, fruit juice, and coffee. Some of the men ate heartily. Some were too anxious to enjoy their meal or even eat at all. “There was very little conversation,” one Marine later wrote, “many of the Marines were still half asleep. The rest of us were deeply engaged in our own personal thoughts.”⁴

On a few ships, navy skippers heeded doctors’ advice to feed the troops a light meal since patients with empty bellies were easier to treat than those with full stomachs. On one of those ships, the USS Crescent City, the Marines were surprised, and miffed, to be fed a meager breakfast of white beans, bread, and coffee. They complained loudly, and unambiguously, to their navy hosts, so much so that the ship’s captain took to the loudspeaker to explain his rationale. After hearing the captain’s announcement, Private Eugene Peterson of the 12th Marine Regiment snuck back into the galley and discovered that the cooks were serving meat loaf to the ship’s crew. He asked for some of the tasty meat, but a sailor tried to shoo him away. “Beat it, Marine. We already fed you.” But the chief cook witnessed this silliness and interceded. “Wise up, punk,” he said to the cook. “This Marine is facing a day of bad news.” The chief wrapped a large chunk of meat loaf in a towel, gave it to Peterson, and wished him luck. Peterson thanked the chief, hurried back to his unit, and found a way to wedge the meat into his pack.⁵

Meanwhile, aboard the myriad troopships, the assault troops were congregating topside, packs and equipment in place, rifles slung, anxiously waiting for orders to board their landing craft. The average infantryman was loaded down with about seventy pounds of gear. When the order came, they clambered, amid semi-organized chaos, over the sides of their ships, down huge cargo nets, into bobbing Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel boats (LCVPs), better known as Higgins boats. Having rehearsed this process many times, they knew to hold the vertical, not horizontal, grips on the cargo nets (so as to avoid having their hands stepped on by the man above them), while descending carefully step by step. At the bottom of the net, about three or four feet above the landing craft, they balanced themselves and then hopped into their waiting boats. One by one the Higgins boats filled up with Marines, then pulled away from the ships and circled in the darkness, waiting for the order to head for shore. Aboard the boats, the Marines, already wet from sea spray, jostled around, breathed stale diesel fumes, and tried to stave off nausea, whether sea- or nerve-induced.

By 0530, just before sunrise, even as the troops were loading into their landing craft, the preinvasion bombardment was in full swing. To the assault troops, the sheer pyrotechnics of the aerial and naval bombardment were awe-inspiring. The ships themselves appeared as nothing more than gigantic hulks in the darkness. When they fired, their muzzle flashes lit up the night, followed by waves of concussion. In that fleeting instant, the troops got all too brief glimpses of the ships themselves or Guam’s coastline. The bombardment was an overwhelming cacophony of sound and violence. The men could feel the concussion in their chests. Their ears were assaulted by so much noise that they had trouble hearing the engines of their landing craft. Battleships spewed sixteen-inch shells at the shadowy hills beyond the beach. Cruisers added hundreds of eight-inch shells. The explosions “sent fire and smoke hundreds of feet into the air,” one Marine officer later wrote. “Small fires burned along the entire length of the beach. Destroyers were firing shells from close range. They roved back and forth, one firing a series of volleys, followed by another firing into the same area.” Each battleship, cruiser, and destroyer bristled with multiple antiaircraft gun tubs. The crews lowered their guns to shoot in a flat trajectory and unloaded a dizzying array of small-caliber shells (mainly 40-millimeter) into preselected targets. Tracer rounds from these guns formed nearly solid orange and red lines that stabbed into the beach with seemingly geometric precision. As the sun began to rise, specially modified Landing Craft Infantry (LCI) ships hurried toward the shore and erupted in volleys of inaccurate but devastating rockets at Japanese pillboxes, command posts, and machine-gun nests. In total, on this day alone, they fired nearly 1,400 rounds of fourteen- and sixteen-inch shells, 1,332 rounds of eight-inch shells, 2,430 rounds of six-inch shells, 13,130 rounds of five-inch shells, along with 9,000 rockets.⁶

The sun had risen by 0630, ushering in a sunny, warm day with near-perfect invasion conditions. If anything, the barrage only intensified in the daylight, obscuring the beaches in plumes of grayish smoke. At this moment, carrier-based fighters and torpedo planes, mostly from the USS Waspand Yorktown, swooped in and unleashed a wave of bombs and strafing, mostly on the invasion beaches. Japanese antiaircraft opposition was desultory at best. In all, the strike planes flew nearly five hundred strafing sorties. They dropped over four hundred tons of bombs and shot at anything that moved on the ground, disrupting Japanese communications and mobility, destroying gun positions, blasting troop concentrations. Above the strike aircraft, spotter planes flew in lazy circles. Inside these planes, trained observers radioed target information back to the ships, enhancing the accuracy of the naval gunfire.

Watching this grand spectacle from their landing craft, the assault troops were deeply impressed. The W-day bombardment was the culmination of seventeen days of aerial and naval pasting of Japanese defenses. “It made you wonder if anything could live through this pounding,” Private First Class William Welch, a first scout in L Company, 9th Marine Regiment, commented. Hundreds of other Marines had the same impression, especially those who were new to combat. To Corporal Maury Williams, a recon scout with the 21st Marines (the Corps often referred to its regiments, but never its divisions, in this fashion), the bombardment was so intense that “it seemed that the island itself would sink into the depths of the waters from the terrific pounding it was taking. I was convinced that not many Japs could survive that fire.”⁷

Others, especially those with prior combat experience, knew better. In previous invasions, they had seen similarly impressive bombardments that failed even to dent Japanese resistance. So, in reality, how effective was this preinvasion barrage? “I would say that the [preinvasion] fires were the most effective of any operation in the Pacific,” Major L. A. Gilson, the III Marine Amphibious Corps naval gunfire officer, later wrote. Another Marine gunnery officer asserted that “when the morning of the landing arrived, it was known that the assault troops would meet little resistance.” Of course, in this passive-voice claim, the officer did not outline exactly who thought this and why. Certainly, though, the assault troops enjoyed no such certainty (although they definitely hoped resistance would be light). Navy sources were equally effusive, claiming that, after the bombardment, the Japanese could defend Guam’s west coast, where the landings were about to take place, with nothing bigger than machine guns.

However, Japanese sources indicated otherwise. After the war, Lieutenant Colonel Hideyuki Takeda, the highest-ranking enemy survivor, indicated that the bombardment had done considerable damage, but not enough to negate powerful Japanese resistance. Takeda estimated that the bombs and shells eliminated about half of the field positions along the coast, all naval gun emplacements in the open, and about half of the guns that the Japanese were hiding in caves. In addition, the aerial strafing restricted the movement of Japanese soldiers and demolished buildings that were not reinforced by concrete. Casualties from all this ordnance were surprisingly low, although some enemy soldiers were destroyed mentally—the Americans called this psychoneurosis or combat fatigue; the Japanese thought of it as a “serious loss of spirit.” The American shells failed to do much damage to any emplacements with more than fifty centimeters of concrete. Nor did they disrupt enemy communications in any meaningful fashion. Basically, for the average Japanese soldier, it was possible to hunker down and wait out the bombardment, terrifying though it may have been.

Without question, the seventeen-day bombardment degraded Japanese resistance in significant ways, but it could not work the miracle of eliminating resistance altogether. Admiral Conolly’s perspective reflected this reality of warfare: “Effectiveness cannot be measured . . . by a total absence of opposition but by what might have been had this [fire support] been lacking.” The bombardment, he felt, was the best he had seen up to that time. Undoubtedly he was right. His task force did an outstanding job. But, even in the absence of any meaningful Japanese air or sea opposition, Conolly knew that American naval and air units could only assist the ground troops, not do the job for them. “The bombardment cannot attain physical land objectives. There always must be fighting by the troops on the shore to secure the positions,” he wrote.⁸

At 0800, the landing craft began to head into the smoke-shrouded beaches. From LSTs some of the troops had boarded directly onto LVTs (Landing Vehicle Tracked), which would take them on their actual beach runs. These specially designed amphibious vehicles were often called amtracs or alligators. They were ideal for breaching the coral reef. Other Marines transferred from their shallow-draft, untracked Higgins boats by climbing over the sides and hopping into bobbing LVTs just before reaching the reef.

Now was white-knuckle time. Most of the boats had been circling in the water for several hours, giving the Marines plenty of time to get wet, seasick, and very nervous about hitting the beach. Faces were drawn and tight. Stomachs were queasy. The raw fear stimulated adrenal glands, enhancing the senses. “Your senses are different when you’re about to invade,” one Marine explained. “The sun is never brighter, the sky is never bluer, the grass, the jungle is never greener, and the blood is never redder. All your senses are just tingling.”

Even as friendly shells shrieked overhead, exploding at unseen targets a few hundred yards ahead on the coastline, the Japanese began shooting at the vulnerable landing craft. The UDTs had done their job so well that there was little to fear from mines or obstacles. Instead, the Japanese lobbed a disconcerting number of mortar and artillery shells at the American invaders. Machine guns splayed bullets along the line of boats, kicking up finger- and hand-sized splashes in the water from near misses. Marine infantrymen drew lower in their boats. Many of them could hear the pinging sound of bullets glancing off the protective armor of their LVTs. Gunners and coxswains had no choice but to remain in their exposed positions, swallowing their bileglobbed fear, praying silently that nothing would hit their boats. Corporal Williams could not resist the curious urge to peek over the side of his LVT to see what was going on. “Explosions and geysers were erupting all around us and I then came to know the fear that would live with me constantly, minute by minute, for the rest of that seemingly endless day.” He watched in stunned silence as an enemy shell scored a direct hit on a troop-laden amphibious truck (DUKW, generally called ducks) some twenty-five yards away. “It was at that point that I realized . . . my life was not as precious to the Japs as it was to my family and myself.” It was his disquieting introduction to the often impersonal killing of modern combat. All up and down the mighty lines of boats inexorably headed for Guam’s coast, some took direct hits; most did not. Smoke wafted in plumes overhead, while water splashed everywhere in a confusing mishmash of boat wakes and near misses.

Aboard another LVT headed for Green Beach, radioman Jack Kerins glanced at his buddy Private Harold Boicourt and noticed how pale and waxy his face looked. Kerins reached out and touched Boicourt and the latter jerked in surprise “as if he’d been shot.” Kerins tried to cheer him up by referring to a song they both liked. Boicourt only stared back with glassy, dilated eyes, almost as if he could no longer comprehend English. A few moments later, an explosion rocked the right side of the boat. “When we looked up,” Kerins said, “our machine gunner was draped limply over his weapon . . . dead.” In a nearby boat, Private First Class Bill Conley, a machine gunner in K Company, 21st Marines, popped up for a look around and was impressed with how many dead fish were floating in the water, including “a barracuda three or four feet long.”⁹

Between 0830 and 0900 the first waves landed on their respective beaches against varying levels of resistance. To the south, at Agat, the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade took intense fire at Yellow and White Beaches. “The beach defenses were well organized and consisted of numerous concrete pillboxes built in coral cliffs and an elaborate trench system extending inland from the water’s edge with many well-concealed machine gun emplacements and tank traps,” the brigade’s war diary vividly recorded. “Heavy resistance was encountered from enemy small arms, machine gun and mortar fire.” At Gaan Point, right in the middle of the landing beaches, a substantial blockhouse with one 37-millimeter gun and two 75-millimeter pieces savaged the approaching LVTs with enfilade (flanking) fire. “The blockhouse was covered by earth to form a large mound, and was well camouflaged,” Lieutenant Colonel Robert Shaw, the brigade’s intelligence officer, wrote. Protected by a four-foot-thick roof, and built into the very nose of the point, the blockhouse’s guns picked off one LVT after another. The shells tore through the thin American armor, igniting fuel tanks, spreading deadly shards, burning men and tearing them apart. Staff Sergeant John O’Neill, a platoon sergeant in L Company, 22nd Marines, was riding in an LVT that churned right into the kill zone. He could see six nearby LVTs already burning and could hear enemy fire above the engine noise. “There was a sudden explosion, a searing blast of heat. The heat and acid smell of black powder was in the air.” The LVT had taken a direct hit on the left side, igniting the driver’s compartment into flames. One of the crewmen was badly wounded, blood pouring from open wounds. Staff Sergeant O’Neill ordered everyone to inflate their life vests and hop over the side. They waded through waist-high water, under fire, some five hundred yards to the beach.

The blockhouse guns continued pumping shells into the LVTs. They torched one boat carrying the 3rd Battalion, 22nd Marines, headquarters group, killing the battalion’s executive officer. In total, the Americans lost two dozen landing craft from enemy fire and mechanical problems. Because of the way the enemy position was built, the Navy could not get a clear enough shot at it, meaning that the ground troops had to take it out. Those Marines who made it to the beach found themselves on the sloping ground just inland, involved in close-quarters firefights with entrenched groups of Japanese, killing the enemy soldiers at hand grenade range, then pushing farther inland as fast as possible. In one such firefight, Staff Sergeant O’Neill was organizing his platoon’s movement when the man next to him suddenly got hit by enemy machine-gun fire. “I stood frozen to the ground and watched the burst take the top of his head off. It seemed like I stood there a lifetime before I could take my eyes from the horrid sight before me. I regained my senses and hit the deck.” With the help of another platoon, they poured fire on the Japanese position, enveloped it, and killed the enemy soldiers.

The Americans also had to assault enemy-held caves, often with the help of tanks. One such cave contained a two-man machine-gun nest whose fire wounded thirteen Marines. American small-arms fire and grenades did nothing to the crew. A newly landed tank rumbled up and pumped three rounds into the cave entrance. One of the enemy soldiers ran out of the cave and sprinted successfully for the safety of another cave. His partner killed himself with a grenade rather than be taken alive. Behind Gaan Point, another group of Marines, augmented by Sherman tanks, maneuvered behind the infamous blockhouse and destroyed it from behind, mainly with tank fire. By early afternoon, the brigade had suffered 350 casualties but had carved out a lodgment a few hundred yards deep. The 77th Division’s 305th Regimental Combat Team stood offshore, ready to reinforce the Marines. Burial parties later counted 75 Marine bodies at Yellow Beach alone.¹⁰

The northern landings were a mixed bag. Generally speaking, the bitterest fighting was in the middle to northern portion of the landing area, from Asan village to the Chonito cliffs near Adelup Point. On the southern end of the two-thousand-yard stretch of beach, near Asan Point, the 9th Marines enjoyed a reasonably smooth landing, although the initial waves were at times pinned down by withering Japanese machine-gun and mortar fire. “The best we could do was crawl forward until we could see an enemy position, then shoot, throw grenades, use flamethrowers, and any other method available to overrun or push back the enemy,” Private First Class Welch recalled. According to one witness, the Japanese “clung tenaciously to installations such as caves, roadblocks, or dug-in positions. Very few surrendered, and it was necessary to destroy each individual in his position.” Fighting in this fashion, the regiment secured most of its W-day objectives, including Asan Point.¹¹

In the middle, at Green Beach, the 21st Marines assaulted in the shadow of an imposing cliff, some one hundred feet high, that loomed menacingly over the water and posed a seemingly impenetrable barrier. Regimental commander Colonel Arthur Butler and his staff had studied, in their preinvasion planning, photographs of two defiles that cut into either side of the cliff. Butler planned to envelop and scale the cliff by sending his 2nd Battalion to the left defile and his 3rd Battalion to the right. “It took ingenuity, back-breaking work under a blazing tropical sun, and a hell of a lot of fighting to do the job,” one regimental officer said.

Indeed it did. When the first waves of the 21st waded ashore, they dodged in and out of shell holes made by the Navy’s bombardment and took shelter in the lee of the cliff. The water from the reef to the edge of the beach was under constant mortar and machine-gun fire from unseen Japanese soldiers on the high ground. LVT coxswains, dodging the intense fire, gunned their engines to the beach, dropped ramps, and practically threw their Marines ashore. It took nearly two hours for Butler’s officers to organize the battalions and make the movement up the cliffs. In that time, the fire grew more intense as the Japanese figured out where the Americans were hiding.

At last, the infantry Marines began their arduous climb, blending in, as best they could, with the thick green foliage and jagged brown ridges that ringed the defiles. Colonel Butler, from a ditch on the beach where he had set up his command post (CP) to avoid mortar fire, raised binoculars to his eyes and watched his men. One of his intelligence officers did the same: “Through field glasses they looked like so many flies crawling up the side of the living room wall. [They] slowly pulled themselves up the cliff, clinging to scrub growth, resting in crevices, sweating profusely in the broiling tropical sun.” Private First Class Frank “Blackie” Hall, a twenty-one-year-old New Jersey native and first scout in F Company, was in the lead of the 2nd Battalion advance. “It was not all cliff. I don’t mean we were hanging by our toenails and fingernails but there were times it was quite steep.” The opposition was lighter than he expected, mostly just small-arms fire from handfuls of enemy soldiers in caves or gullies. The battalion did not reach the top until several hours later, well into the afternoon.

On the right, the 3rd Battalion Marines worked their way up the southern defile, across a small road, along the Asan River. Here too opposition consisted of small, disorganized groups of enemy soldiers. “They were dug in . . . under the ground everywhere,” Private First Class Frank Goodwin said. “They had . . . trap doors that they could throw open and start shooting. We were taking mortar fire from the hills.” A machine-gun nest opened up. Two bullets tore into Goodwin’s buddy, hitting him in the chest, killing him instantly. Everyone else hit the ground. As was so common in these situations, most of the men hugged the ground and merely waited for things to quiet down, or someone to take charge. In the meantime, a few brave individuals maneuvered around, figured out the guns’ location, and killed the enemy soldiers at close range, with grenades and small arms. In this manner, with plenty of stops and starts, the battalion reached the top of the cliff by midafternoon.

The 21st Marines had accomplished the amazing feat of taking the cliff in the face of enemy opposition. But they were exhausted from the heat, the sheer physical challenge of climbing such steep ground, and dealing with the stress of fighting groups of Japanese who could pop up anywhere. They were thirsty. They already missed buddies who had been killed or wounded in the course of the day. They were bruised and scraped from diving for cover and crawling along the earth. Their trousers and fatigue blouses were disheveled and torn. Even so, they knew they had to hold this newly won high ground. If the Japanese got it back, they could “place observed fire on all our beach installations, the Division command post and the Regimental Command Post,” one officer later wrote. Tired or not, the Americans dug in a few hundred yards inland, along a prominent ridge that overlooked the cliff. Whether they liked it or not, they knew that modern combat was about physical endurance as much as anything else.¹²

Butler’s Marines would have been chagrined to learn that their 3rd Marine Regiment comrades a few hundred yards to the left had an even rougher landing. Here too the terrain presented a major obstacle. To the left of Red Beach, Adelup Point (referred to as “the Devil’s Left Horn” by the Americans) jutted gracefully into the sea, flanking the landing beaches. A massive seaside red-clay ridge, known as the Chonito Cliff, towered over much of Red Beach. Not far from the waterline, a seawall offered a bit of cover but also restricted movement for men and vehicles alike. Japanese mortar and artillery observers, augmented by machine gunners and riflemen, were holed up in caves within Chonito Cliff, overlooking the water. They had even built tunnel systems to connect caves. This afforded them protection from the preinvasion bombardment along with excellent sight lines and fields of fire. Farther inland, the cliff gave way to a dizzying array of rice paddies and ridges (the most prominent of which was named Bundschu Ridge after a company commander) that typified much of the terrain behind all the invasion beaches. “The innumerable gulleys [sic], valleys and ridges might as well have been gorges and mountains,” the division after action report sardonically commented.

Colonel W. Carvel Hall, the regimental commander, planned a quick two-battalion attack, designed to get inland, envelop the cliff, and neutralize the ridge, all before the Japanese could recover from the shock of the bombardment. The problem was that the enemy soldiers had not been particularly hard hit by the barrage. They were alert and ready, waiting for the most advantageous moment to open fire. Artillery pieces on Adelup Point menaced the Marine LVTs as they closed in on Red Beach. Mortar shells and Nambu machine-gun fire greeted boats as they inched onto the bracketed beach. In one LVT, Corporal Pete Gilhooly, a squad leader in I Company, hurled himself over the side, steadied himself under the weight of his sixty-pound pack, and ran up the beach. “I was looking right into a Japanese bunker, right on the beach. Without further ado, I threw a hand grenade in there and took off.” He and his comrades crossed a beach road, then turned to ascend the side of the cliff. At this point, I Company and the whole 3rd Battalion ran right into the cross fire of the concealed Japanese defenders. They were taking fire from cliff-side caves as well as the distant ridges. The result was horrible. “They attacked up a 60-degree slope,” a Marine correspondent wrote, “protected only by sword grass, and were met by a storm of grenades and heavy rifle, machine-gun, and mortar fire. The physical act of forward motion required the use of both hands.” In one company alone, half of the Marines were killed. “You could see little black figures crawling up the slope,” one Marine witness later wrote. “You could see little black puffs of smoke coming out around them, which were grenades the Japanese were throwing at them. You could see the guys tumble up and roll back down the hill.”

The beach itself was also under withering mortar, artillery, and machine-gun fire. Troops who were unloading supplies, litter bearers who were hauling wounded men, and carrying parties that were attempting to get ammo, equipment, and water to the forward Marines found that any movement could bring death. Pinned-down men lay in clumps, waiting out the shelling, resting, or steeling themselves for the courage to get up and move forward. The rotting, humid smell of death hung over the beach. In the tropical air, the dead were decomposing quickly. “Shore parties were working over the bodies as fast as they could under enemy fire, but it was a difficult job just to stay alive yourself, let alone identify a corpse and dig a grave in the beach for it,” one Marine observed. Navy corpsmen scurried around, treating the growing number of wounded men lying on litters. Many were at the waterline, waiting to be picked up by LVTs that were themselves still under fire. In one part of the beach, a wounded Marine with a destroyed foot limped around, in a daze, whimpering for a corpsman.

The battle, like most, was not an organized, precise effort. It degenerated into a ragged contest of small groups, on-the-spot leadership, and physical probabilities. The caves were the main battlegrounds. Squad-sized groups of Marines, sometimes assisted by tanks, assaulted the caves. Flamethrower men took the lead. Stinking of fumes, bending under the weight of their cumbersome fuel tanks, they edged up to caves and torched them with two-second bursts. Nearly every cave had to be taken or sealed because, when outflanked, the Japanese would not retreat to their own lines. Instead they would stubbornly stay in place and fire on the Americans from the rear.

For the infantry, the day dragged on (at least for those lucky enough to survive), melting into one assault after another. Nothing could be taken without the foot troops taking the lead, yet often they could make little headway without tank support. The 3rd Marines took the cliff about midday, but they remained under intense enemy fire. In just one typical instance, mortar fire killed six men and wounded two others in Corporal Gilhooly’s squad. A few hours later, the regiment took Adelup Point, following an intensive barrage by destroyers, rocket ships, and tanks. Resupply was now a problem since it was very difficult to haul crates of ammo, food, and water cans up the cliff. Any movement on flatter ground provoked enemy fire. Ingenious Marines rigged up cables to and from the cliff, in order to move supplies and wounded men. For a longer-term solution, engineers and Navy construction battalions (Seabees), with the help of bulldozers, scooped out a road at the tip of the cliff, all the while under fire. By the time the sun set on that horrible July 21, the 3rd Marine Division and 1st Provisional Marine Brigade had carved out shallow beachheads, none more than a few hundred yards deep. The 3rd Marine Division alone had suffered 105 killed in action, 536 wounded, and 56 missing in action. With every passing hour, though, the Americans grew stronger as reinforcements and supplies came ashore, all protected under the watchful gaze of a powerful, unopposed fleet.¹³

The Japanese planned to crush this lodgment before it could grow any larger. From the beginning, their intention was to defend Guam at the waterline, counterattack immediately with all-out banzai charges, and repel the invasion. Like Germany’s Erwin Rommel, who had opposed the Normandy invasion the previous month, the Japanese at Guam believed that the Americans were at their most vulnerable during the invasion itself. If allowed to come ashore in large numbers and build up their awesome array of firepower and logistical capability, they would inevitably prevail. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, and Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina, the Japanese commander at Guam, believed that “victory could be gained by early, and decisive, counterattacks.” For two years, since Guadalcanal, this had been the Japanese approach: defend at the waterline, counterattack, and overwhelm the Americans with all-out banzai attacks that epitomized the Japanese fighting spirit (yamato-damashii), and thus Japanese superiority. Guam was the classic case of this offensive mentality. “Counterattacks would be carried out in the direction of the ocean to crush and annihilate [the Americans] while [they] had not yet secured a foothold ashore,” Lieutenant Colonel Takeda later wrote.¹⁴

On the evening of July 21-22, the Japanese began a series of such disjointed attacks against the American beachheads. Most of the attacks consisted of infiltration by individual Japanese soldiers or groups of a dozen, twenty, or thirty. This followed the tableau of the Pacific War. At night the Japanese liked to sneak into American “lines,” which were usually nothing more than perimeters of loosely organized foxholes. “They come to you,” one Marine commented, “especially at night. They infiltrate very well.” The Japanese attempted to crawl close to the holes, surprise the occupants, and kill them at close range. Through long experience, the Americans knew to expect such frightening personal assaults. Men slept in shifts or in fits and starts. By and large, anyone moving at night outside of their holes was fair game. Navy ships assisted the ground troops by illuminating the area with star shells, bathing the landscape in undulating half-light all night long. “These would light up several hundred feet overhead, and slowly drift downward providing a light bright enough to detect anyone moving near you,” Private Welch recalled.

Most of the Japanese activity on this night consisted of these sorts of terrifying but small-scale encounters. The exception was the 1st Marine Provisional Brigade sector, where Colonel Tsunetaro Suenaga, commander of the 38th Infantry Regiment, ordered a full-scale attack, with General Takashina’s permission, to eliminate the American Agat beachhead. What is truly revealing is that both officers knew the attack would probably fail to annihilate the American beachhead, and would likely destroy the remaining combat power of the 38th. Yet they still decided, with little debate or caution, to do it. In this sense, they were facing a logical consequence of the decision Takashina and his superiors in Tokyo made to resist the American invasion at the waterline and push them into the sea with immediate counterattacks. They had designed their defenses, and deployed their soldiers, with this in mind. Now, with the successful American landing, they felt their best option was to carry out their original plan. But there was something else at work here. So powerful was the self-sacrificial suicide yamato-damashii cult among Japanese officers on Guam that such an attack seemed the only proper course of action. In so doing, they were, in effect, putting their heads in a collective noose and even fastening that noose in place.

That night, when the order filtered down the ranks, the Japanese soldiers took the news with sadness and stoicism. They were good soldiers who followed orders. Beyond that, though, they were products of a culture that placed a high value on meaningful gestures, personal sacrifice, and eternal honor. Some of the men cried. Most burned letters and mementos from home. The men of one battalion ate a last meal of rice and salmon, washed down with liberal quantities of sake. Colonel Suenaga burned the colors of his regiment lest they fall into enemy hands.

At around midnight on July 22, they unleashed a volley of mortar and machine-gun fire while the lead troops, screaming at the top of their lungs, rushed forward in waves, crashing into the American frontline foxholes. “The Japs came over, throwing demolition charges and small land mines like hand grenades,” one Marine infantryman remembered. “Six Marines were bayoneted in their foxholes.” The Americans opened up with machine guns, rifles, grenades, and mortars. Fighting raged back and forth for control of Hill 40, a prominent patch of high ground that overlooked the beach. In the eerie half-light, combat was elemental, often man-to-man, the sort of vulgar struggle that permanently scarred men’s minds with the awful memories of intimate killing.

One key to the American stand was artillery. Since about midday, many batteries of the 12th Marines and the 40th Pack Howitzer Battalion had been in place, firing in support of the infantry. Now, in the middle of the night, the gun crews responded to fire mission requests, even though their positions were under attack. “Our battery fired between 800 and 1,000 rounds of ammunition that night,” Lieutenant P. A. Rheney of the 40th recalled. In one gun pit, Captain Ben Read, the battalion’s executive officer, spotted four shadowy figures following a line of communication wire. He challenged them and they rolled away, whispering in Japanese. A gunnery sergeant in an adjacent hole threw a grenade, killing one Japanese. Rifle fire killed the other three. “By about 0130, we were up to our necks in fire missions and infiltrating Japs,” Read wrote. “Every so often, I had to call a section out for a short time so it could take care of the intruders with carbines and then I would send it back into action again [firing their howitzers].” In another gun pit, Private First Class Johnnie Rierson saw four enemy soldiers, exposed by the light of a flare, edging toward his position. He and another Marine opened fire with their carbines. “We killed one, but another one was only wounded. He kept trying to toss grenades into our gun pit before he died, but they hit a pile of dirt. That saved us.” They later found two bodies a few yards away.

Night attacks are always among the most difficult of operations, even under the best of conditions, and for the Japanese, these were hardly the best of conditions. The Japanese attack quickly degenerated into a confused melee, with small fanatical groups wandering around, looking for trouble, then getting cut down by American firepower, particularly machine guns. In one instance, a Japanese soldier was silhouetted against a ridge, fully visible under the light of a flare, yelling at the Marines: “One, two, three, you can’t hit me!” The Americans riddled him with a hail of rifle bullets. Elsewhere, Colonel Suenaga, brandishing a sword, was leading his men. He got hit by mortar fragments, staggering him. A rifle bullet finished him off. He went down in a lifeless heap.

The most serious threat to the U.S. Agat beachhead was an enemy tank-infantry attack on the Harmon Road in the 4th Marine Regiment sector. The Marines could hear “the elemental noise of motors and guns and tank treads grinding limestone shale. Banzai screams pierced the flare-lit night.” There were four light tanks, with thin armor and small guns (so small they were derided as “tankettes” by the Americans). Private First Class Bruno Oribiletti destroyed two of the tanks with bazooka fire before he himself was killed. A platoon of Sherman tanks, augmented by howitzer fire from Captain Read’s battalion, blew up the other tanks. Most of the Japanese infantrymen around the tanks fought to the death. By dawn, after a furious night of fighting, Colonel Suenaga’s attack was over. The 38th Infantry had practically ceased to exist. Japanese bodies were lying everywhere, rotting in the rising sun. Captain Read found a dozen corpses near his gun pit. “The dead Japs did not have weapons, but were loaded with demolitions and grenades.” They had intended to blow up the howitzers. Staff Sergeant O’Neill of the 22nd Marines also counted twelve enemy bodies near his position. “All night, the Japanese [had] probed our lines, first one place, then another.” The American beachhead remained secure. All Colonel Suenaga had succeeded in accomplishing, besides his own demise, was weakening the Japanese ability to defend against American efforts to break out of the Agat beachhead. Dismal failure or not, the pattern was set. The Japanese on Guam now chose to succeed or fail with such counterattacks.¹⁵

Fright Night

The evening of July 25 was rainy and tense. For several days, the Americans had advanced incrementally, launching costly daylight attacks, enduring nighttime infiltrators and small banzai assaults. The two American beachheads still had not joined hands. Neither of them was any more than a couple miles deep. Casualties were piling up. Infantrymen dug shallow foxholes along ridgelines or any other high ground they could find. Frontline positions consisted of various holes, each one about three feet deep (at best), spaced several yards apart, with two or three men in each hole. Mortars and artillery pieces were in gun pits a few hundred yards behind the forward holes. In the 3rd Marine Division’s beachhead, medics had set up a field hospital in a draw, just inland from the beach. Support troops were having a difficult time resupplying the frontline fighters because of bad weather, challenging terrain, and Japanese mortar and artillery fire. Guam was shaping up as a slow, bloody slog.

The Japanese were also hurting. Day by day the Americans were grinding them down with their relentless attacks and firepower. General Takashina had lost about 70 percent of his combat troops, along with many of his commanders. His units were immobilized during the day by pervasive American air strikes and naval barrages. By July 25, he believed that his men would not be able to stand the mental strain of the American attacks much longer. Takashina felt that, at this rate, he and his men were simply waiting for inevitable defeat and death. In the words of one of his officers, the general felt that “some effective measure was urgently needed.”

For Takashina, that effective measure meant an attack. Yamato-damashii demanded aggressiveness, not passive defense. Takashina felt that the American lodgment was still vulnerable. He must eliminate it before the Americans had time to land more troops, more vehicles, and permanently entrench themselves with their incredible ability to build roads, organize their ground forces, and employ superior technology. He made up his mind to gather his remaining strength and launch an all-out effort to push the Americans into the sea. Although this would be a nighttime banzai attack, it would not merely be a mindless suicidal gesture. Takashina planned to amass the remnants of his 18th Infantry Regiment, along with the 48th Mixed Brigade, and hurl them at the 21st Marines while exploiting the gaps that existed between the positions of the 21st and its neighboring regiments. Having breached the American lines, Takashina’s stalwarts would then savage the American rear areas, thus extinguishing the Asan beachhead. Meanwhile, at Agat, the 38th Infantry’s survivors, many of whom were bottled up on the Orote Peninsula, were to fight their way out and inflict devastating losses on the 1st Marine Provisional Brigade. The plan was a long shot, based on audacity and verve. It was the ultimate example of the prevailing Japanese notion that American invasions could only be defeated at the waterline by overwhelming, self-sacrificial counterattacks.

So, on the night of July 25, as periodic thunder showers pelted frontline Marines, filling their holes with water, the Japanese exchanged good-byes with one another and said final prayers in preparation for their sacred assault. The mood among them was one of sadness laced with grim determination. The word gyokusai (meaning death with honor) could be heard passing from the lips of many of these men. “Some took out photographs of their parents, wife, or children and bid farewell to them,” Lieutenant Colonel Takeda wrote, “some prayed to God or Buddha, some composed a death poem and some exchanged cups of water at final parting with intimate comrades. All pledged themselves to . . . meet again at the Yasukuni Shrine [in Tokyo].” The men believed that their spirits would live on forever at this great national shrine. Most fortified themselves with generous quantities of sake. A few might even have dulled their fears with narcotics. Forward they went, into the night, in groups small and large, noisy and quiet.¹⁶

A few hundred yards—and another culture—away, many of the Americans could sense that something was afoot. Most expected the same sort of limited banzai attacks that they had absorbed, and defeated, the last few nights. This soggy, humid evening would be no different, or so they thought. The rain ended, leaving only the sounds of occasional firing along the front. Beads of water dripped from trees or the edges of foxholes. Young Americans settled in for yet another frightening evening of keeping watch for enemy infiltrators. One of those Americans, Frank Goodwin, an eighteen-year-old kid from Malden, Massachusetts, was sitting in a shallow fighting hole, atop a small hill, peering into the darkness. Around him other men of I Company, 21st Marines, were doing the same thing. At his elbow, his buddy was sleeping since it was Goodwin’s turn to keep watch.

Goodwin was huddled behind the protection of several coral rocks that he and his buddy had stacked for protection around their hole. In front of the position, Marines had placed empty ration cans on sticks in hopes that anyone sneaking up on their holes would bump into the cans, thus making noise. Overhead a flare bathed the area in half-light. Goodwin looked down the hill and caught sight of what looked like four tree stumps a couple hundred feet away. He did not remember them being there in the daytime, but he knew the mind could play tricks at night. He woke his buddy and told him to take a look, but he saw nothing. “I stared out in that direction for a long time,” Goodwin said, “and as nothing seemed moved I guessed he was right.” Besides, if they were that close, they would surely run into the cans. Exhausted from several days of existence on the front lines, Goodwin dozed off with a pistol in his lap.

A couple thousand yards to Goodwin’s left, Private First Class Ed Adamski was in a machine-gun nest that served as a forward outpost for F Company, 9th Marines, a unit that had spent the day in bitter combat to capture a patch of high ground known as the Fonte Plateau. The company belonged to the 2nd Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cushman. They had been detached from their parent regiment and plugged into the 3rd Marines’ sector because the latter regiment had suffered so many casualties.

Tonight was Adamski’s twentieth birthday. He had once been an amateur boxer on the South Side of Chicago. Now he was a dog handler. He and about ninety other Marines and sixty dogs comprised the 3rd Marine Division’s Provisional War Dog Company. The dogs and their handlers were sprinkled among the division’s infantry units. Most of the dogs were Doberman pinschers, Labrador retrievers, or German shepherds. They were intensely faithful companions, superbly trained to detect the presence of the Japanese. Marines liked having them around because, during daylight attacks, they helped locate where the Japanese were. At night, they had an uncanny knack for knowing when infiltrators were approaching. For handlers like Adamski this meant round-the-clock work with little sleep. His Doberman, Big Boy, was fearless. On W-day, he had steadied the young Marine during an intense enemy mortar barrage. Since then, Adamski’s stomach had been tied in knots (a common symptom of fear), but Big Boy’s friendship and fearlessness had kept him going.

Just before midnight, Big Boy suddenly jumped up and alerted them, pointing in the direction of the Japanese lines. The machine gunners with Adamski knew what that meant—the Japanese were coming. Big Boy settled down and then alerted them several more times. Adamski told the machine gunners to expect an attack any minute. With dilated pupils and racing hearts that pumped adrenaline-rich blood, they tensed and waited for the onslaught.

On the right flank of the 21st Marines’ position, Private First Class Roger Belanger and his buddy Joe Babitz were walking warily through the dark, carrying out a contact patrol in the gap that existed between their regiment and the 9th Marines. Their job was to find where, exactly, the left flank positions of the 9th Marine Regiment were and then report that information back to their own unit. Before leaving for their dangerous patrol, they had smeared mud on their faces to hide their white skin at night. Up ahead they could see the 9th Marines trading shots with an unseen enemy unit. Knowing now the location of the 9th, they decided to turn around and go back to their own unit. They began to descend into a ravine. All at once, Belanger heard Japanese voices in the night. He and Babitz did not know it, but they were right in the pathway of Takashina’s lead troops, who were carrying out the general’s plan to exploit the gap between the two American regiments.

With every passing second, the Japanese were getting closer. Terrified, Belanger turned and whispered to Babitz: “Joe, take a couple of hand grenades, stick them in the mud with the pin off. Take your .45 [pistol], put it in your hand and have it cocked. I’ll watch your back. You watch my back.” Ever so quietly, they lay down on the grenades, pistols ready, watching the approaching enemy. There were about thirty or forty of them. Closer they came until they were almost right on top of the two Marines. Belanger’s heart was beating so violently that he was sure the Japanese could hear it. “Then, all of a sudden, they stopped. One of ’em started pissing all over us. Then they were laughing. One of ’em gave a kick that hit me on the side of the . . . left rib. I was saying my prayers, to tell you the truth.” Another one of the enemy soldiers was holding a bayonet. For a split second, it looked like he would drive the bayonet into Babitz’s back but he did not. Belanger was tensed and ready to shoot him. “Then they went by. They kept chattering and chattering, Japanese lingo, and they went down that draw.” When the voices died down, Belanger stood up, hollered, “Tojo eats shit!” and hurled all of his grenades into the ravine. Still shaking from their close call, he and Babitz made their way back to their 60-millimeter mortar position in support of C Company, 21st Marines.¹⁷

In these last few moments before the great attack, other Japanese were nowhere near as stealthy. Private Bill Karpowicz, who was peering into the night, aiming his Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) in the general direction of the Japanese lines, could hear them “yelling, making noises like beating of metal drums, whistle blowing etc.” Another Marine heard the enemy “laughing like shrill hyenas, clanging sabers against bayonets shouting ‘The emperor draws much blood tonight.’ ” Other Americans heard the sounds of bottles shattering amid slurred bellows, shrieks, and screams. The Japanese soldiers hollered many chilling phrases: “Wake up, American, and die!” “Marine, you die tonight!” One even cried “Fuck Babe Ruth!” Sometimes they parroted the Americans, hurling grenades and yelling “Fire in the hole!” or “Corpsman!” The yelling was a classic example of posturing. Human beings, when facing a fight, will often scream, carry on, and strike an aggressive pose in hopes of forcing their opponent to flee. In this instance, though, the Americans were far from intimidated. Although the roaring enemy voices were eerie, most of the Marines were well used to this kind of thing. “It sounded like New Year’s Eve in the Zoo,” one of them sniffed. There was not one recorded instance of a Marine running away at the sound of the enemy screams.¹⁸

Supported by an intense mortar barrage, a wave of disjointed attacks hit the American lines just after midnight. Saber-wielding Japanese officers led the way. Enlisted men carried rifles, grenades, knives, bayonets, explosives, and even, in a few instances, pitchforks and baseball bats. Screaming “banzai,” they hurled themselves across open ground, into ravines and gullies, over the tops of ridges and up hills, straight into American machine-gun fire. They went down in droves but, in no time, the frenzied survivors were among the American holes. Frank Goodwin was awakened by the bloodcurdling scream of a Japanese soldier who jumped right into his hole. Startled and terrified, he rolled onto his back and pointed his pistol, “firing at the same time, hitting the Jap in the face and he fell right on top of me.” All at once, another enemy soldier was in the hole attacking Goodwin’s buddy, a large man named Jernberg. The big Marine grabbed the smaller Japanese soldier, “picked him right up by the crotch . . . and threw him out of the hole and then went after him. Somehow or other, he found a rock in the middle of this and smashed his head in. All along our lines the screaming Japs were making their assault. We fought . . . with anything we could get our hands on, entrenching tools, pistols, rifles, fists, and rifle butts as they were right in the holes with us.” Some of the Japanese had explosive demolition kits strapped to their chests. They tried to jump into the American holes and detonate the explosives. “There were pieces of flesh flying all over the area” as Japanese soldiers detonated their kits.

Ed Adamski, the dog handler, saw Big Boy spring to full alert and emit a snarling bark. A split second later, the Japanese were running right at his machine-gun positions. As Big Boy lunged to attack them, the machine gunners opened up, mowing down rows of enemy soldiers. Adamski aimed his carbine at one man and hit him twice in the chest. But there were many more, all over the place, screaming, shooting, and trying to jump into Marine holes. “You could hear ’em popping the grenades on their helmets [to arm them] . . . then the explosion.” Adamski was shooting at them with one hand and dragging Big Boy back into the hole with the other. A grenade exploded close, showering his chest with fragments, knocking him out from concussion. Big Boy somehow remained unscathed.

The same could not be said for Private First Class Dale Fetzer’s dog, Skipper. When the Japanese attacked Fetzer’s foxhole, Skipper obediently remained in the hole while his master fought hand to hand with a Japanese soldier. Another enemy soldier dropped a grenade into the hole. The explosion sent shrapnel into Fetzer’s legs, knocking him into the hole. Skipper had massive shrapnel wounds. As the fighting raged around them, Fetzer tried to administer first aid to his beloved dog, but to no avail. The young Marine had his head pressed against Skipper’s chest and listened as his companion’s heart stopped beating. Rage engulfed Private First Class Fetzer. “I went crazy. I stood up there like a wild man shooting. Around my foxhole, there must have been eight or ten Japs laying there. They shouldn’t have killed my dog. That was just like a piece of me.”¹⁹

The situation was beyond chaotic. The fighting was personal, intimate. It was warfare at its most elementary and nasty. Baker Company of the 21st Marines was especially hard hit, and nearly wiped out, because the unit was right in the path of Takashina’s main attack. Private First Class Mack Drake, a BAR man in the company, was on the unit’s right flank, atop Bundschu Ridge, blazing away at Japanese shapes in the shadowy half-light of flares. A grenade exploded a few feet to the right, breaking his assistant’s hip and lacing Drake’s right ear, shoulder, and face with fragments. Still, the eighteen-year-old from Hendersonville, North Carolina, kept reloading twenty-round clips into his BAR and shooting. “I . . . shot several of the enemy in front of my position and their bodies were lying in front of me.” A sword-wielding Japanese officer saw Drake and charged at him. “He tripped while swinging the sword and fell toward me. I was able to finish him off aided by my K-bar knife.” Drake’s use of the euphemism “finish him off” is revealing and typical. True, he did end the officer’s life, but finishing him off really meant stabbing him to death, a traumatic method of extinction for killer and victim alike, so much so that it is hard for the killer to describe it without the emotional distance afforded by a euphemism.

Not far away, Private First Class Roger Belanger, the mortarman who had earlier bumped into the Japanese as they were infiltrating the American lines, was desperately fighting for personal survival (similar to every other American that night). “My carbine stock was broken [from using it as a club]. I bit one Jap’s nose right off his face and spit it out. I had [a] Bowie knife and I used that. I took that Bowie knife and I grabbed him in the stomach and stabbed. We were using rocks or anything. I was taught to chew tobacco and I got to like it and I was spitting in their eyes. I did a lot of atrocious things. It was my life or theirs. It sounds like a movie, but it wasn’t.” Nearby, an enemy officer sliced open the abdomen of another Marine. The American lay badly wounded, his guts hanging out, creeping down his leg. The Japanese soldier went down in a hail of bullets.²⁰

But the Japanese were still coming in ranks four deep. Private First Class Jim Headley, a member of an artillery forward observation team, mowed down several enemy soldiers with accurate carbine fire. He noticed a Marine just ahead, almost in the line of fire, and he kept yelling at him to move, but he would not. Just as Headley was about to run out of ammo, someone from another foxhole passed him a sock full of clips. Alongside Headley, Corporal Elwood Richter was firing with impunity at the approaching figures. “It was like shooting fish in a rain barrel,” he later said.

This battalion, the 1st of the 21st Marines, was so hard hit that it was on the verge of total destruction. In this kind of devolving situation, a few courageous individuals can make a world of difference. One such person was Captain William Shoemaker, the commander of A Company. A retreat rumor, stoked by the chaotic fear that was unleashed by the banzai attack, circulated among some of the men. Wearing a captured Japanese trench coat, Shoemaker was all over the place, issuing orders, instilling confidence, telling his men they could not retreat. “Hold your lines, men. If the position falls, the whole beachhead will be endangered,” he said. When he again heard someone screaming to withdraw, he stood up and yelled, “No, by God! We stay here and hold them!” His men held him in very high regard so they heeded his orders. In the estimation of Private First Class Walt Fischer, one of his telephone wire men, the captain was “a great guy” and a real leader. The captain asked Fischer to go on several ammo runs to the rear. Fischer braved intense enemy fire to do so. On one run, though, a rifle bullet slammed into him like a baseball bat. “It went along the side of my head and through my ear. It went down my cheek . . . out the back of my ear, out the back of my helmet.” A corpsman bandaged his head and got him to the beach. Captain Shoemaker held his unit together, adding much to a stalwart American defense. “[He] contributed tremendously toward the defense of positions that night,” the battalion executive officer later wrote.²¹

At the front edge of a sector held by K Company, 21st Marines, Private First Class Bill Conley was hurling grenades into the half darkness. Friendly mortar shells were hitting just ahead, undoubtedly inflicting casualties on the approaching enemy. In the light of the mortar and grenade explosions, he could see Japanese soldiers in crouched and crawling positions, edging closer. Conley looked to the right and glimpsed Japanese soldiers stabbing two riflemen in an adjacent hole. He sensed that the enemy was only a few feet in front of his own hole, but the .30-caliber machine gun was holding them back. Conley’s crew ran out of fragmentation grenades so they threw a white phosphorous grenade. White phosphorous is designed to burrow into the skin, burning all the way through the body. Water only intensifies its heat. White phosphorous also emits white smoke. The Japanese saw this, screamed “Gas” to one another and abruptly ceased attacking Conley’s hole. “We must have gone through about eight or ten boxes [of ammo], about two hundred fifty rounds in a box. The gun was so hot . . . you could . . . light a cigarette off the barrel.” Conley could see enemy bodies lying in piles outside the hole. He estimated that there were about fifty of them out there. To Conley’s right, Private First Class Karpowicz was at the end of the company line. Somebody had told him that he was the only man between the 21st and 9th Marine lines. Pointing his BAR to the right, he was shooting at running groups of Japanese. “With the flares bursting, lighting the area, I was able to see the enemy. As I saw, I raked the area. The noise was unbearable, our firing and the racket from the enemy.” As fast as he expended magazines, his assistant loaded new ones for him.

Not far away, Lieutenant Bill Lanier was in another hole, confronting a horde of running enemy soldiers. Like nearly every other Marine, he hated them intensely. He saw them as “fiends,” or “Japs, Nips,” or even “diabolical animals.” Like everyone else, he dehumanized them, not just out of hatred, but in order to justify killing them with impunity. Denying the enemy’s essential humanity was as old as warfare itself, a crucial component to war’s necessary killing. It was also an American cultural tendency, especially in the country’s modern wars. As the Japanese charged at Lieutenant Lanier’s hole, he and the Americans around him shot them down in droves. There were literally piles of bloody Japanese corpses around the holes. Still, their survivors kept coming, jumping into the Marine holes for death struggles. “Here truly is a personal fight for survival,” Lanier wrote. “You are not fighting for glory now, nor for your country, nor your buddy. You are fighting to survive. You kill him by the quickest method you know, not because you are brave or heroic, but because you have no choice.”²²

Elsewhere, Staff Sergeant John O’Neill and his platoon were dealing with a similar situation. “They came in waves and like a solid wall, yelling and shrieking. Every gun we had was blazing away, but that didn’t stop them. The first wave broke through.” Sergeant O’Neill stood up and emptied an entire BAR clip of twenty rounds into several of them. The survivors dispersed a bit, gravitating away from his hole, attacking other Marines. O’Neill’s foxhole buddy, Shorty Ferro, asked: “What are we gonna do?” “Pray that we’ll see the sunset,” the sergeant replied. O’Neill did but not Ferro, who soon got hit. “His face had been shot away.” He sagged and died in the sergeant’s arms. Soon American artillery began landing among the fourth and fifth waves of Japanese, inflicting horrible casualties. “Arms and legs flew through the air as thick as rain,” O’Neill wrote. An officer, watching the same barrage, compared the flying arms and legs to snowflakes. “Japs ran amuck. They screamed in terror until they died.”

The Japanese broke through in many places, so American artillery and mortar crews were often under direct attack themselves. Nonetheless, as the attack wore on, the American supporting fire grew steadily more accurate and more intense. The artillerymen fired twenty-six thousand rounds that night. Tanks also added devastating machine-gun and main-gun fire, cornering many screaming groups in the open. At times the enemy soldiers hurled themselves at the tanks. “Savagely they swarmed upon the mechanized vehicles, oblivious of the vicious machine-gun fire, and frantically pounded, kicked and beat against the turrets in an attempt to get the crew within,” a witness recorded. Infantrymen blasted the enemy soldiers off the friendly tanks. One can only imagine how disquieting this experience must have been for the tank crewmen.²³

Those Japanese who succeeded in breaching the front lines roamed the night, attacking the 3rd Marine Division’s rear areas, including its hospital. Others holed up in caves, their courage diminished, waiting for the right moment to escape or to kill any Americans who wished to dislodge them. Confusion reigned supreme for both sides. But the Japanese could not exploit that confusion. Their assault was way too disorganized. Minute by minute, the Americans rallied, stood fast, amassed their firepower, and annihilated the Japanese attackers. “The enemy didn’t seem to know what to do after he got behind us,” the 3rd Marine Division’s after action report accurately commented. A major reason for that was a lack of coordination because of the early loss of leaders. In general, the Japanese soldier depended heavily on his officers. Their army did not value individual initiative on the part of low-ranking soldiers. Draconian discipline was standard. Officers ruled their men with proverbial iron fists. They also were expected to set the example, and lead the way in every combat situation. “The [banzai] attack was led by officers,” a 21st Marine Regiment post-battle report explained. “The result was that practically all of their officers were killed initially and the troops that penetrated our lines were ‘lost’ once they had broken through and lacked the initiative and leadership to carry out their attack.”²⁴

Thus, by the time the sun had risen, Japanese fortunes had set. In the gathering daylight, the Americans hunted down and killed the remaining enemy. They killed them in caves and ravines where they had taken confused shelter, apart from their decimated units. Some of the Japanese killed themselves by holding grenades to their abdomens, blowing out their intestines. The Japanese battalions no longer had any semblance of organization or command unity. Nearly all of the commanders were dead. The vast majority of Japanese had died within sight of the original American positions. The beleaguered survivors now found themselves trapped among the Americans, like veritable scorpions in a bottle. As an example, one group of enemy soldiers was cornered near a gun position by a group of artillerymen from the 12th Marines. Like most Japanese, they were more interested in death than surrender. “We were set [upon] by an officer leading a banzai rush,” one of the Marines recalled. “About 10 ft. behind him was one Nip, and about 15 ft. behind him came three more. The officer was killed immediately, the one behind him wounded and falling back about 20 ft. dying. The others tried to retreat, but were killed.” This deadly drama was repeated in at least a dozen other spots.²⁵

By noon, the crisis was over. Some seven thousand Marine riflemen had successfully defended nine thousand yards of ground. General Takashina’s great attack had failed miserably. He himself had escaped, although he would be killed a few days later. The putrefying corpses of his brave soldiers lay everywhere in mute, ghastly testimony to the dismal failure of a flawed concept. “In some spots there were heaps of cadavers, with a sprinkling of arms and legs that had been blown from bodies by mortars,” a Marine recalled. “It was impossible to walk two paces without stepping on an already bloating body.” They carpeted the entire battle area. They were tucked into ravines and lying within strands of tall grass that were waving in the afternoon sea breeze. They were heaped on the knolls and ridges as well as near American foxholes. Some were lying half buried in the sand of the invasion beaches.

For fifty yards around Lieutenant Lanier’s foxhole “was pile after pile and row after row of the beasts in every conceivable stage of crawling and charging with arms, legs and weapons in grotesque positions.” The lieutenant was unmoved by the sight. Like most of the other Americans, he was infused with the dehumanization of war. He hated the Japanese, seeing them as dangerous, treacherous beasts that must be exterminated. “One never minds seeing dead Japs—they’re just like so many animals.” Staff Sergeant O’Neill’s platoon had started the night with thirty-six men. Now fifteen were dead and another eleven wounded. The ten survivors were “grimed with coral and mud, deep lines etched into young-old faces, the thousand-yard stare of battle shock in their eyes, cracked lips parched with dried blood.” They stared dully at the nightmarish scene of slaughter around them. “The enemy dead laid two and three deep in front of our lines. There were many instances of Jap and Marine laying side by side. The ground was slick with blood. Water in the foxholes from the rain was a reddish brown muddy liquid.”²⁶

The stench was already considerable. The rotten, corrupting, languid smell of death ebbed and flowed on the breeze. Flies and maggots were already descending in pestilential droves to feast on the dead flesh. Private First Class Goodwin, who had fought much of the night with his bare hands, came upon a pile of dead Japanese. “The Japanese were very young and their eyes were wide open . . . and flies were all over them. It was just terrible. It smelled like garbage, rotting garbage . . . with a very sweet smell. Their bodies were all swelled up and black.” His torso and his field jacket were covered with the blood of the man he had stabbed to death. He poured an entire canteen of water on himself, trying to wash the blood off, to no avail. He changed clothes but the stains remained on his skin. There were mental stains, too. For the rest of his life, he had trouble sleeping through the night.

At the division hospital, now secure after a horrible evening of fending off banzai assaults, doctors and corpsmen were totally absorbed in treating many hundreds of wounded men. Private Jack Kerins was passing the hospital’s surgery tents, on his way to the front, when he noticed the survivors of B Company, 21st Marines, shuffling into the hospital area. He knew that these men were the remnants of a company that had been nearly annihilated. “They were filthy and ragged and wore blood soaked bandages at different places on their bodies. Some were openly crying. I never learned what happened to those Marines, but I do know I’ll never forget them.” The 3rd Marine Division lost 166 killed, 34 missing, and 645 wounded in the enemy attack.²⁷

Ever the souvenir hunters, many of the Americans were already stripping the Japanese bodies of swords, pistols, binoculars, watches, rings, flags, pens, photographs, and other family mementos. A few Marines even carried pliers to remove gold teeth from Japanese corpses. Intelligence specialists combed the bodies for documents and other important military information. None of this would have been appropriate behavior in a “normal” situation. But, in the context of war, it was standard stuff. The same was obviously true for killing. Though the Americans viewed their enemies as animals, and knew they must kill them in order to survive, this still took a toll on everyone who had to take lives. Like other normal human beings, these Marines eventually carried some remorse over having to kill, even under such justifiable circumstances. “After the war was over, my thoughts on killing started to change,” Jim Headley wrote. “As time went by, my attitude toward the enemy went from survival to regret—taking a life and sending someone into eternity. This bothered me and stayed on my mind.”²⁸

S. L. A. Marshall claimed that, in World War II, less than 20 percent of American soldiers ever fired their rifles in combat. He believed that the reluctance to shoot came from an unwillingness on the part of the average American man to kill. He further claimed that, even when men were directly in danger of being killed themselves, they still would not fire their weapons. Marshall was an excellent combat historian who did much pathbreaking work on the realities of battle for infantrymen. He was correct about the intrinsic hesitancy to kill, and he intuited something of the psychological cost of having to do so. However, he exaggerated this pacific tendency’s effect on real battles. Moreover, he based his contentions on no verifiable evidence.

In actual combat, American troops did fire their weapons in large numbers and they did kill the enemy in order to survive. The banzai attack at Guam is a prime example of this. The Americans fought with whatever weapons they had in order to survive. If they had not done so, the beachhead would have been destroyed. In fact, rifles and grenades did most of the killing on the evening of July 25-26, not crew-served weapons. This meant that, contrary to Marshall’s contentions, men killed their enemies at close range, with no unwillingness to shoot. The surviving accounts and records of the battle—and they are extensive—reveal no instance of an American refusing to fire his weapon, choosing his own death rather than be forced to kill the Japanese. This does not necessarily mean it never occurred, as perhaps this happened to some of the dead and they, of course, cannot contribute their perspective. However, one would think that if such reluctance to fight existed, it would feature prominently in survivors’ accounts. Another important point to consider is that the Guam banzai attack was just one of many such similar attacks in the Pacific War, with generally identical results. At Guam and elsewhere, American troops fought to the death and willingly obliged Japanese suicidal tendencies. With sardonic wit—an American cultural tendency—the Marines on Guam even circulated a handbill that described banzai attacks in the familiar terms of a carnival promotion: “Tonight: Banzai Charge. Thrills, Chills, Suspense. See Sake-Crazed Japs Charge at High Port. See Everybody Shoot Everybody. Come Along and Bring a Friend. Don’t Miss the Thrilling Spectacle of the Banzai Charge, Starting at 10 P.M. and Lasting All Night. Admission Free.”²⁹

The failure of Takashina’s Guam gambit destroyed the Japanese position on Guam. He had lost thirty-five hundred of his best soldiers. “The Jap charge had wasted the cream of the enemy troops on the island,” the Marine correspondent Alvin Josephy correctly wrote. “After the failure of the charge, they had nothing more to oppose us with.” They had lost 95 percent of their commanders and thousands of spirited soldiers, not just in the charge but also in resisting so stubbornly near the waterline since W-day. As a result, their offensive power was shattered. All they could do now was to withdraw their dispirited remnants to more defensible positions and wait for the Americans to overwhelm them. “From that day on, the campaign was all ours,” the 3rd Marine Division’s after action report succinctly stated. The Americans secured the island, against noticeably diminished resistance, within the next two weeks.

By giving in to their cultural vanity, the Japanese had played right into the American strengths of firepower and tenacity. Attacking Japanese soldiers were out in the open, calling attention to themselves (to put it mildly), thus making perfect targets. This practically guaranteed them a fatal beating from American firepower. In the close-proximity nighttime fight, personal weaponry did most of the actual damage. Had the attack come in the daylight, artillery, mortars, air strikes, and naval gunnery presumably would have decimated them. So, from an American perspective, the banzai attack was the best thing that could happen. “We well know that these night banzai attacks are the best and least costly way of eradicating the largest number of these fiends,” Lieutenant Lanier explained. “This way they must come out into the open . . . where you have the protection of your own foxhole and organized fire.” Combat infantrymen like Lanier knew that such attacks were terrifying and psychologically damaging, but they were preferable to assaulting strongly fortified Japanese positions full of fanatical enemy who would fight to the death. After Guam, the most thoughtful Japanese commanders understood that banzai assaults were foolish, wasteful, and counterproductive. Instead they now decided to entrench, fight defensively, force the Americans to come to them, and bleed them into nothingness. They would exploit what they saw as American cultural weaknesses—impatience and an unwillingness to suffer large numbers of casualties.³⁰