On the other hand, the big things had gone well in the morning and afternoon. By the standards of Tarawa and Saipan, casualties were light—15 dead, 225 wounded. The body count for the Japanese was 438. Despite drizzling rain, narrow beaches, and undiscovered mines, 15,600 troops were put ashore along with great quantities of materiel and equipment that included four battalions of artillery, two dozen half-tracks mounting 75mm guns, and 48 medium and 15 flame-throwing tanks which found the Tinian terrain hospitable for tank operations. The tanks had gotten into action early that morning, leading the 24th in tank-infantry attacks. They also had come to the aid of the 23d Marines as that regiment moved inland to take over the division’s right flank. The beachhead itself was of respectable size, despite the failure of some units to reach their first-day objectives. It extended inland nearly a mile and embraced defensible territory. On the whole, it had not been a bad day’s work.
[Sidebar ([page 9])]:
Tinian Defense Forces
Japanese military fortification of Tinian and other islands in the chain had begun—in violation of the League of Nations Mandate—in the 1930s. By 1944, the Tinian garrison numbered roughly 9,000 army and navy personnel, bringing the island’s total population to nearly 25,000.
The 50th Infantry Regiment, detached from the 29th Division on Guam, was the principal fighting force. It had been stationed near Mukden, Manchuria, from 1941 until its transfer in March 1944 to Tinian. Many of its troops were veterans of the Manchurian campaigns. The regiment was commanded by Colonel Kiyoshi [also spelled “Keishi”] Ogata and consisted of three 880-man infantry battalions, a 75mm mountain artillery battalion equipped with 12 guns, engineer, communication, and medical companies, plus a headquarters and various specialized support units, including a company of 12 light tanks and an anti-tank platoon. He also had a battalion of the 135th Infantry Regiment with a strength of about 900 men. Altogether, slightly more than 5,000 army troops were assigned to the island’s defense.
The principal navy unit was the 56th Naval Guard Force, a 1,400-man coastal defense unit, supplemented by four construction battalions with a combined strength of 1,800 men. Other naval units, totaling about 1,000 men, included ground elements of seven aviation squadrons and a detachment of the 5th Base Force.
The navy personnel—about 4,200 altogether—were under the immediate command of Captain Oichi Oya. Both Oya and Ogata were outranked on the island by Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuda, commander of the 1st Air Fleet with headquarters on Tinian. But Kakuda, as the invasion neared, had no air fleet to command. Of the estimated 107 planes based at Tinian’s air fields, 70 had been destroyed on the ground early in June by U.S. air strikes. By the time of the Tinian landing on 24 July, none of Kakuda’s planes were operative.
Kakuda had a bad reputation. He was, by Japanese physical standards, a hulking figure: more than six feet tall, weighing more than 200 pounds. “He willingly catered,” Hoffman wrote, “to his almost unquenchable thirst for liquor; he lacked the fortitude to face the odds arrayed against him at Tinian.” Historian Frank Hough called him “a drunk and an exceedingly unpleasant one, from all accounts.”
On 15 July, nine days before the invasion, Kakuda and his headquarters group attempted to escape via rubber boats to Aguijan Island where they hoped to rendezvous with a Japanese submarine. This effort failed. He tried again on five successive nights with the same results, finally abandoning the effort on 21 July. He fled with his party from Tinian Town to a cave on Tinian’s east coast where they awaited their fate. A Japanese prisoner who described Kakuda’s escape efforts assumed he had committed suicide after the American landing, but this was never verified. Toward the end of the battle for Tinian, one of Kakuda’s orderlies led an American patrol to the cave. The patrol was fired upon and two Marines were wounded. A passing group of Marine pioneers sealed the cave with demolition charges but it is unknown whether Kakuda was inside.
Admiral Kakuda in any case took no part in directing the Japanese resistance. For purposes of defending the island, command of both army and navy forces was assumed by Colonel Ogata, but co-operation between the two service branches was less than complete. Frictions were reflected in diaries found among the Japanese documents captured on Tinian. A soldier in the 50th Regiment’s artillery battalion wrote: