Return to Guam

The high-speed offensive of Pacific amphibious forces in the Marianas rolled on last week, engulfing Guam and Tinian.

For 17 days the 25,000 Chamorros on Guam* had quaked in their flimsy thatch houses or hidden in caves while U.S. aircraft, battleships, cruisers and destroy ers rained explosives on the first piece of U.S. territory captured by the Japanese. Liberation was coming, but first a hail of steel.

Thursday broke with a heavy overcast, darkened in patches by rain squalls. The sun tried to pierce the vapors, and a rainbow appeared. At the end of the rain bow, as the seaward-looking Chamorros saw it, were most of the U.S. Fifth Fleet and 'the ships of the Third Amphibious Group under round-faced, round-bellied Rear Admiral Richard L. Conolly. At the end of the rainbow, as the shoreward-looking U.S. seamen and assault troops saw it, was the airstrip on Orote Peninsula.

At 8:28 a.m. the first wave of the 3rd Marine Division (part of the Third Am phibious Corps under Major General Roy Stanley Geiger, USMC) hit the beach between Adelup Point and Asan, north of Orote. Eighteen waves followed them with triphammer precision.

"Blasted to Hell. . . ." As often in the past, the unfathomable Japs passed up their chance to exact heavy casualties off the beaches. Said Conolly, tugging at his green fatigue cap: "We simply blasted the Japs to hell out of there and up into the trees." But it was not as simple as that. The Japs, estimated variously at 10,000 to 20,000, had three times as great an area (225 sq. mi.) as on Saipan into which to withdraw, to fight like cornered beasts in ravines and caves until destroyed to the last one.

That would come later. The Japs still had guns, still had fight in them even after 10,000 tons of shells and bombs had ripped their two-and-a-half-year-old defenses. By noon of D-day the marines had tanks ashore, had fought their way inland through charred and tattered palm groves, using grenades, rifles, machine-guns, light field pieces & flamethrowers.

While advance elements pushed rapidly forward, ahead of schedule, with casualties running at the same rate as on Saipan (150 dead & missing each day), the Army's 77th ("Statue of Liberty") Division was landed in support of the marines. The Japs quickly gathered their strength and Loyal U.S. nationals, but not citizens. counterattacked on both sectors, mainly at night, but were beaten back. At the end of four days Orote with its airstrip was cut off; several villages had been occupied; the once-sleepy capital, Agafia, shattered by shellfire, was sleepless but expectant.

Shore to Shore. From newly secured Saipan the weary survivors of the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions, under their new corps commander, Major General Harry Schmidt, USMC, effected the first shore-to-shore amphibious movement of the Central Pacific offensive. In landing craft, under an umbrella of shells, they swarmed across two-and-a-half-mile Saipan Channel, quickly established two beachheads on Tinian. The island, less mountainous than Saipan or Guam, has no harbor. Its principal value would be to furnish more airstrips. The one built by the Japs had long been neutralized by artillery firing from Saipan, by aircraft based on Isely Field.

The rest of the Marianas were on the King-Nimitz schedule. Most useful would be Rota, between Tinian and Guam, and Pagan, on the road to Tokyo.

*Loyal U.S. nationals, but not citizens.

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