To us in the lower echelons it was just the same old stuff that we’d been doing for a solid year: filing up from compartments below decks to your assigned boat station, going over the side, hurrying down the net to beat the stopwatch, into the heaving LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel), and away. Then the interminable hours of circling, meanwhile getting wet, hungry and bored. The K rations (in a waxed box) tasted like sawdust; the weather got rougher and rougher. Some of the men got seasick, and all of us were soaking wet and cold.
Finally we headed back to our transport and clambered up the cargo net with a sigh of relief. The next day it was the same thing all over again, except that this time we went ashore. This, too, had an awfully familiar feeling: wading through the surf, getting your only pair of shoes and socks wringing wet, and then onto the beach where all the sand migrated inside your shoes. A series of conflicting and confusing orders flowed down through the chain of command: halt and move on, halt and move on, go here, go there.
The vast attack force now gathered at Pearl Harbor. Although there were unfortunate accidents to some of the landing craft, over 800 ships set out in the naval component, some for direct fire support of the troops, some for transport, and some (the fast carrier task force) to make advance air strikes and then to deal with the attack which the landing probably would incite from the Japanese Navy. Holland Smith’s V Amphibious Corps, totalling 71,034 Marine and Army troops, sailed with some slow elements starting on 25 May. The specialized craft for the ground forces ran the gamut of acronym varieties. After staging through the Marshalls, the armada headed for the target: Saipan.
At sea the troops got their final briefings: maps of the island (based on recent American aerial and submarine photographs of a hitherto “secret island”), estimates of 15,000 enemy troops (which turned out in the end to be 30,000 under the command of Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito and Vice Admiral Chiuchi Nagumo), and detailed attack plans for two Marine divisions.
Simultaneously, the American fast carriers’ planes began, on 11 June, their softening-up bombing, combined with attacks on Japanese land-based air. Two days later, the main enemy fleet headed for the Marianas for a decisive battle. Then, on 14 June, the “old battleships” of the U.S. Navy, reborn from the Pearl Harbor disaster, moved in close to Saipan to pound the Japanese defenses with their heavy guns. That night underwater demolition teams made their dangerous swim in close to the assault beaches to check on reefs, channels, mines, and beach defenses. All was now in readiness for the landings.
The bloody business of D-Day was, as the troops well realized, only a beginning, for the long, gruelling fight which began the next morning.
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Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 89883
LtGen Smith in his command post ashore on Saipan uses a high-powered telescope to observe his troops in action.
Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith, one of the most famous Marines of World War II, was born in 1882. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1905. There followed a series of overseas assignments in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, and with the Marine Brigade in France in World War I. Beginning in the early 1930s, he became increasingly focused on the development of amphibious warfare concepts. Soon after the outbreak of war with Japan in 1941, he came to a crucial position, command of all Marines in the Central Pacific.