Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 271 - The Battle Of Saipan

Episode Date: August 6, 2023

US Marines and Soldiers invade the fortress island of Saipan and end up hating each other almost as much as the Japanese. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: http://www.battleofsaipan.com/seabee.htm Philip Crowl, "Campaign in the Marianas", vol. 9 Richard Frank. Downfall: End of the Imperial Japanese Empire https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/saipan-a-crucial-foothold-in-the-marianas/ https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/duel-to-the-death/ https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-war-between-the-smiths-high-command-feud-at-saipan/

Hey, everybody. Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lionsledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audio book, read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show, as it's always been, ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Lions Led by Donkeys podcast i am joe and with me trapped on a small

tropical island surrounded by angry japanese soldiers of the imperial era is tom i have not even i have not even told you what this episode's about i have no idea what this episode's gonna be and i'm like hmm surrounded by angry japanese. This is either going to be World War II or the Tokugawa Shogunate. You know, I'm actually kind of disappointed in myself. I haven't explored more of the Tokugawa era or even the Senkoku period and stuff. Because I'll tell you why it's interesting to me and everybody's going to laugh at me for it. It's not because I ever studied this period in university i never touched on japanese history was not part of my program at all but i love shogun total war you're such a dweeb look i've never once

in the in the years doing this show have i ever denied the fact that i am an insufferable nerd yeah do you know what we should do a series about the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It will be like seven episodes long, but... It wouldn't be the longest. I mean, I think it would be tied, but it wouldn't be the longest. Now, the reason why I said that you were surrounded by angry Japanese soldiers of the Imperial Era

is because today we are talking about a little thing known as the Battle of Saipan. Oh! Saipan famously the site of the incredible beef between Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane in 2002 during the World Cup. What?

Okay, so... Every time this happens. Every Irish person's ears have just, like, pricked up. So, Roy Keane, very famous footballer, now football manager, absolute mental cunt. Like, from the time he was, like, early on in his career, like,

super aggressive and super physical player, like, incredible footballer, but, like, would, like, go in both feet, slide tackles, like like would kick people hit them on the pitch i can respect i'd like if you're gonna go down and hold your shin and cry about it it better be like i'm glad there's a footballer that makes you actually earn it yeah and like so for the entirety of his career was like very opinionated and not afraid to say it like would say shit to managers say like stuff to the press that like any other footballer would be like too afraid

of like repercussions for their career where he was just like nah fuck this like so in 2002 the world cup was being held in saipan and essentially they arrived there and they were like was it in japan at the time yeah yeah okay um so the the quality of the pitch that they were training on it was kind of shit the weather was like super hot 2002 is when it was split between korea and japan okay yeah so um the pitch like the ground was really hard. It was really dry. It was really hot. And, like, Roy Keane was essentially like, why are we training on this terrible pitch when other people have better, you know, better places to train?

And, essentially, this, like, blew up to the point of, like, he told Mick McCartney, the then Ireland soccer manager, to be like, you know, sort it out or I'm gone. And he left. Like, he just, like, said, nah, fuck this, and left. And, like, no joke, this split Ireland, like, down the middle. Like, this, like... Thankfully that's never happened before. Like, to...

To this day, like, if you're in a pub with, like, people's daz and you bring it up, like, people are still so passionate. This was, like, the second Irish Civil War. Like, no, like... Wait, wouldn't it be, like, a third? I mean, yeah. Let's call it, like, 1.5.

So, like, it played out in the media over the course of like weeks and everything and it was like it was like such a divisive thing that like people were like they either were on roy keen side or they weren't and they were like no he was right to leave you know he was he was justified like everything that he brought up was true and correct and then there's people like yeah but he should have just gone on with it like you know he should have just like played the matches and like to this day like 21 years later like it's still a super contentious topic well the battle of saipan we're going to talk about today um is only slightly worse okay that's a bit of an understatement it involves something that is now known as suicide cliff so what do you know about the battle of saipan i mean like it's interesting to me because

obviously nate and i were in the american military so these things are kind of mythologized to us i mean not other of us were marines but you know we went through normal american history education which of course talks about world War II an awful lot. I'm curious what you, an Irish guy not in the military, knows at all about the American Pacific theater of World War II. Literally nothing. I know it was shit. And they had to spend a whole lot of time clearing islands.

And in the 70s, they found weird Japanese holdouts, which I learned from this show. God, those guys rule. I think my favorite one was the guy in guam who just lived in a cave it didn't bother anybody and his cave is still there in guam um so saipan has something of a nickname like the term d-day like when you hear it what do you think you think of normandy of course like now d-day means something much more than that it's literally just like the day that this big operation is supposed to start so now when we think of d-day we immediately think of operation overlord which is the really sick name for the invasion of normandy now saipan is known as the pacific dDay, so you know it's not going to be good.

Saipan is a small island measuring about 50 square miles, 12 miles long, and about five miles wide at its widest point. Though, to be fair, this is quite large for an island in the Pacific theater. When you think about Tarawa, Peleliu, and other things that we have talked about, this is actually kind of big. Peleliu and stuff like other things that we have talked about, this is actually kind of big. It's the largest of the Northern Marianas Islands, which today, of course, is an American Commonwealth. But during World War II

it was part of the Empire of Japan because it had been captured by the Japanese from the Germans during World War I and had been given to them as a prize for being on the winning side of that whole European clusterfuck. And then it became part of this thing known as the South Seas Mandate. There's a lot

of islands in the Pacific that have very strange histories. Most people don't know that Samoa, not the American part, but the independent nation of Samoa was once a German colony. What? Yeah. There's a lot of weird shit

happening in the Pacific before World world war one so you're saying the rock is a post world war two german psyop i don't know if he's from samoa or american samoa and i don't want to look it up wait i'm looking it up i'm looking it up we're doing live research on the show uh the entire

uh wrestling dynasty is actually agents of the Kaiser well he was born in California well of course he was his family comes from one of the Samoans I'm not entirely sure which one yeah no so his

mother is Samoan and his dad is Tony Atlas aka Anthony White who was from Virginia well look the Kaiser is involved somehow Japan wanted

Saipan for one very very specific reason it's like a last fortress they could build to defend the home islands in any future war in the Pacific. It became a very important outpost. Japanese settlers and construction workers flooded in by the tens of thousands to build the infrastructure a fortress and a settlement would need. Previously, the Germans hadn't really done anything.

They hadn't even bothered to build a road, which is pretty common for the Pacific holdings. They just wanted them to be like, look what we have. They didn't actually do anything with them. Using it kind of just like a physical fortress. Yeah. By the time World War II would finally start, almost 30,000 Japanese workers had moved into the highland, which outnumbered the Saipan natives. There's only like 9, 000 natives compared to 30 000 japanese workers uh even before japan would fuck up catastrophically and bomb pearl harbor to bring

the u.s kicking and screaming into the world war ii saipan was well fortified with coastal artillery bunkers underground facilities you name it i don't i don't like the idea of underground facilities yeah and like they they dug a ton of them and there was already a pretty massive natural cave system on the island all of which will soon become a nightmare for the americans imagine if hosha had a discovered saipan it would be like his hodge. We need more Albanian cave systems. I support the expansion of the Albanian Pacific Empire. Greater Albania.

Of course, for years none of this would be needed. But eventually, by 1944, the sun was rapidly setting on the once rising sun of the Empire of Japan. Also known as the finding out portion of fucking empire of japan also knows the finding out portion of fucking around and the japanese home islands which had been being bombed already by the american uh air arm it was the saipan was wanted by the united states because obviously

they couldn't bypass it they needed it they needed to invade it but also because if they took it over their bombers would be much closer to the japanese home islands um and it would just be constantly raining you know hellfire from the sky both figuratively and then eventually literally aka henry kissinger's wet dream of killing asian people yeah he he missed out uh unfortunately he made up for that god imagine how bad it would have been if henry kissinger had have been in some semblance of like influence during world war two i know he's but he was still a kid i mean he's technically an undying orb of flesh these days we must destroy the orb now saipan was not alone in this operation, but the Caroline Islands and Palau would also be part of the target as part of a greater operation called Operation Forager. Though, just because Japan was on its last legs did not mean they would be going down without a fight. entire defense of this area was Lieutenant General Hideyoshi Obata, commander of the 31st Army,

who was in charge of defending three different American targets at the same time, which is not ideal. On Saipan, Obata had around 31,500 men, but it was as badly organized as the Japanese military could be. For starters, and we've talked about this a lot the japanese imperial army and the japanese imperial navy fucking hate one another and you have both on the island and he is technically in charge of both of them they got as they got about as close as you could really get to being in the middle of a civil war without actually starting one so he's just japanese imperial john hume like the at a certain level uh like that the army and the navy of japan had a more important role of being politicians than actually like a military branch they were fighting for influence

and power within the halls of the imperial government these beefs literally had body counts uh political assassinations against the two and sometimes civilian government politicians were incredibly commonplace and this is even to go into all of the coup plots and attempts and this is effectively japan is a military dictatorship at this point um but it wouldn't become like a literal one until after this battle but between the army and navy those were the two strongest arms of the imperial government like the prime minister at the time is still hideki tojo but he was in the army so like so the navy fucking hated him uh and they wanted like a navy guy to be prime minister not like so you know there's a civilian government as window dressing yeah it's it's the call of duty versus battlefield mid-2000s are mid to 2010s argument going on it's like which side are you on

you can't play battlefield and caught at the same time you got to pick one or the other and meanwhile like the the japanese civilian government is the guy still insisting we play counter-strike no the japanese uh imperial government is people who play arma you know that's fair that's fair the naval forces were commanded by vice admiral kuichi nagumo whose name might ring a bell for some deep history nerds out there, because he was there for the highest of highs and the lowest of lows when it came to the Pacific War against the Americans.

Oh, when those lows are going to get so low. Well, the low ends with this being the last battle he's going to fight in. He was the commander of the attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as the commander of the Japanese naval Armageddon at the Battle of Midway. Most people, like when they think of Pearl Harbor, they think of Isoroku Yamamoto, but he actually planned it.

He didn't command it. Nagumo commanded it. And then, you know, Midway being the wall that eventually slammed into the Imperial Navy. Now, Nagumo had zero ships he was in charge of 7 000 sailors which included marines while obata the overall commander had 22 000 soldiers and of course the two sides hated one another i have a question how do you have 7 000 soldiers and no ships uh like Like coastal defense batteries were naval personnel. They had like special landing teams, which we just use the term marine for shorthand

because they're like naval infantry, naval engineers and construction workers. They tended the docks. Because hypothetically, the Japanese Imperial Navy could show up here okay which we'll get to why that isn't the case uh why they don't eventually show up because it ends in something nicknamed the great marianas turkey shoot so it's not like some guy in like water wings like swimming out with a gun actually funny story so obviously there's never a american invasion of the japanese

home islands because you know they split the atom and then two cities but i'm gonna watch oppenheimer at like two o'clock i attempted to watch it last week but it was sold out and there's only one one showing in english everything else is in russian somewhat ironically and the uh the illegal stream that you found online didn't work it sucks it's a hand can thing and it's just that guy who like you know he had to sit at the front of the imax and the screen is all distorted yeah it's it's not good uh but during the the proposed american invasion of the Japanese home islands, the Japanese had defenders whose plan it was. You know old-timey pressurized diving suits with the big fucking helmet, like the diving bell? They had thousands of people whose job it was to literally sit like crisscross applesauce on the bottom of the sea hooked to an oxygen line to the surface and then when

the invasion started they were to simply walk out to the American fleet on the sea floor and then stab the bottom of American ships with a suicide spear like it had a giant shape charge at the end of it

so they did kind of had a guy in water wings. Somehow the Japanese invented the big daddy from Bioshock. That's right. 60 years before all what's his face who I can't remember his name. That's right, baby. So the two sides absolutely hated one another. Like when Obata had command meetings,

Nagumo just wouldn't show up naval officers openly disrespected and uh disobeyed their army superiors so the situation was you know bad and to make matters worse when the american invasion fleet appeared off the coast obata wasn't even on saipan he had gone over to palau for an inspection of their defenses and then got trapped there, unable to return. So in his place to be Lieutenant General Yochisogu Saito, another veteran of the Kuatong Army. So you know he's a real bastard and a political monster as well as being a literal physical monster. And Saito came up with a simple plan. While other Japanese commanders had the tactic of letting Americans come to shore and then kill them when they're in large numbers, he wouldn't.

He knew from the beginning they were almost certainly leading a suicidal defense and there'd be no hope of winning the battle, which I suppose is a good place to start from. Like, can't go any lower if you know you're going to die. Yeah. Time to fight dirty. Kicking people in the nuts and the shins. See, just like our episode about North Korea, he had a whole bunch of guys in boots waiting to just drill people in the balls.

Putting, like, fucking landmines on the end of your boots and just kicking people into space. The bonsai nut kick. I mean, to be fair, that would be an incredible like fallout like insane weapon it's just a pair of boots with like explosive charges and you hit someone and just turns them into pink mist i feel like a rocket powered boot for kicking probably already exists in some form of fiction or another it's probably like that a the guy in like the is it the fourth or the sixth century i know i talked about it on

um failure to launch with uh quinn and the two chrises uh check out that episode about uh the chinese rocket science scientist mafia war um and like the vaguely remember him he like this guy strapped like 48 rockets to a chair and got all yeah and like just like they all lit it and like he disappeared so they assume oh he went to space rather than getting vaporized yeah i mean that's why like every single isis suicide bomber is actually orbiting the earth with satellites right now that's the real space debris yeah um now sito's plan was very very basic they would resist the americans from day zero like before they got to the beach on the beach they would resist them every single inch of the way and without thoughts of winning and knowing that a battle of attrition was his only tactic to bleed the Americans so badly it might slow down their future plans, he decided the best thing to do was to turn the

island into effectively a giant 50 square mile long death trap. Unfortunately for Saito, Saipan had a lot of beaches that were good for landing an invasion force, and he had no idea where the Americans would pick, so he would be forced to defend the entire coastline. Now, at this point, the American island hopping campaign had been long and brutal, and we've covered several parts of it on this show before. The Americans had learned a lot of lessons from places like Tarawa and the Solomons, and in this situation, somewhat differently than other operations, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marines would be working together. differently than other operations, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marines would be working together.

Of course, this would turn into its own inter-military beef in a bit, but we'll get there. Also, the logistical side of this operation is something so long and stupid, but somehow works that it could only be the product of the American military. Despite the Marianas Islands being 3,000 miles away from Hawaii, then an American territory, now a state, it would be the base for all of this it was where the invasion force would come out from and it would act as the logistical hub carrying a never-ending armada of supply ships that would fuel operation forager despite the fact again 3 000 miles away it's the kind of shit that no one else is ever going to try to pull off no that sounds like especially now when you think of like like military logistics are just like so much more complicated because there's so much more technology involved like a mat like this

was just like dudes on like uh long transmission radios communicating now imagine you're like dickhead sergeant is there trying to like connect to the vpn on his military laptop and it's not working and back in world war ii it's like if you look at the statistics of like most ships built during the war it's like it's like looking at the defense spending of the u.s compared to everybody else like america just hit the ships go burr button and just spit them out by the thousands um operation forger began on j 11th, 1944, as the American fleet numbering of these several hundreds of combat ships, as well as 15 aircraft carriers under the command of Raymond Spruance, got within 200 miles of Saipan and began to spit out Hellcats to destroy the Japanese

Air Force on the ground, as well as destroy airfields. So if a few Japanese planes got off the ground, as well as destroy airfields. So, you know, if a few Japanese planes got off the ground, they would have nowhere left to land. Afterwards, hundreds of American ships began a naval bombardment. And this is where things kind of go wrong for the US Navy. The gunnery crews of these ships were pretty much brand new and had virtually no experience when it came to ground bombardment. There had been a ton of reconnaissance to pinpoint which areas needed to be hit more than others,

but the naval bombardment just kind of fired wildly towards the island in the distance, hitting whatever it accidentally managed to hit. Of course, this didn't do much of anything. And, you know, credit where credit's due to the japanese like they have been fighting on island hopping campaign for years as well and they have been getting bombarded by american coastal bombardments for years as well so they were pretty good at like building bunkers that unless they were like t-slotted with a direct hit from a naval cannon they were probably going to

survive same goes for their like gun emplacements like they they knew how to build stuff at this point you just uh just like double kill overkill headshot yeah they they got the uh the the 10th uh kill streak award which is how the nuclear weapons were detonated robert oppenheimer got a 25 kill streak and dropped the nuke. Yeah, but you know full well he was using those Akimbo MP7s because

Robert Oppenheimer was a bitch. He probably had martyrdom equipped too, the fucking asshole. Last stand using asshole. This went on until June 15th when the first invasion force of 8,000 Marines backed into hundreds of Amtrak landing vehicles.

And unlike the Amtrak that Americans know and love today, these ones are actually on time. They made for a four mile wide landing beach in the southwestern corner of the island at 7 a.m. And everything from the landing from corner of the island at 7am and everything from the landing from here on out would go

terribly wrong. Almost immediately the men driving the Amtraks under Japanese fire, heavy surf and wind got lost and began landing men at random across a four mile long front. Now some of the confusion actually had nothing to do with the Japanese but because

some guys read a map wrong. You see, the beaches are split up by color and number, which was very, very, very normal for amphibious landings. The problem is, is the Marines not trying to trash talk Marines here. They'll probably come later, but Marines can't read. They can't read. I mean, not being able to read maps is a tale as old as time when it comes to young officers at any bridge i am a marine i am in the water i don't need to read fish can't read i came here to bleed not to read um now the marines had never done an

operation this size before like the marines of world war ii were not the like the combined arms large-scale operations guys that they have weirdly turned into in the decades since right they weren't tactical at this stage no they're mostly just like young guys from nebraska who were really sick of being sent on islands they couldn't pronounce dudes from the center of america who've literally never seen a big body of water or some are suddenly in the pacific like i didn't know they had this much water yeah uh and so they you know they have numbered and and color-coded beaches but there's so many of them and they're transporting so many soldiers things just get

fucked up for example like these beaches are split like red one red two green one green two and so forth it's like you having to switch for a whiz air flight in rome i don't want look i don't i'd rather land on saipan than fly fly one or whiz air ever again oh i'm gonna have to do it soon but yeah i mean i will be as well unfortunately because would you live in a place that is not a travel hub you pretty much have to rely on low-cost airlines um now one of the guys in charge of one wave simply saw green on a map and assumed this must be the right beach but he'd actually landed marines at green two that were supposed to go to green one so as soon as they got to shore nobody was unsure of who's in command of what or where they had to go because like they're

looking at their map of where their objectives are supposed to be because they're like they assume they land on the right beach because like no one's gonna think like the Navy's gonna drop us off in the wrong fucking place this is your only job and they look at the map like this looks completely different yeah these these

Marines are like can in the latest Barbie movie their job is beach i mean kind of yeah i don't know what beach my job is just beach yeah it's like if ken had to run ashore on a beach through landmines i'd watch that and barbie too yeah that actually but funnily enough since we're talking about ken um after barbie came out and obviously became wildly popular brands like mattel were trying to figure out okay how can we sell like dolls to boys it was gi right yeah i was caught do you know what it was called it was called action man i used to have an action man as a kid action man is just gi joe but he's inbred and wearing a pith

helmet we gave gi joe a habsburg jaw now as soon as the marines actually got to shore wrong beach or not the japanese artillery opened fire on them virtually all of their guns had survived the naval bombardment and the shelling on the beach was so intense that marines thought they'd actually land in the middle of a minefield now this was actually made easier by the japanese because they had bracketed the entire beach and planted flags so like you know when it's like reference points rather than actually having to like figure out where anything was yeah distance and everything the artillery gunners could just be like green flag and they knew exactly what that meant and then you know marines got rapidly turned into pasta sauce the japanese artillery were using

an aimbot yes they just had a modded 360 controller. They're doing like 360 no-scopes with mortars. It all comes back to Counter-Strike, baby. See, the problem with the Marines was they didn't come to shore hopping up and down. Otherwise, they would have been fine. They weren't doing like AWP reload tricks, you know. Another interesting fact that nobody learned

until that moment was Saipan's beach is a particular kind of sand that is incredibly fine to the point it's almost dust. So the Japanese artillery churned this shit up, creating what is effectively a giant dust storm on the beach, making breathing and seeing a real pain in the ass. Also, I suppose as well for landing, if it's like like so fine it's probably not that porous and absorbent so like as soon as you're like stuff is landing on the beach it's probably getting stuck in the drift sand before it even properly beaches that's right which will bring us to the story about the tanks in a little bit oh god why i peek behind the curtain i never see any of these scripts and somehow i oh despite not knowing anything about what we talk about

i somehow have like have premonitions about what's about to fuck people over i can't remember which one of the of our guests or co-hosts over the years like can i take a peek at the script versus like no yeah it's against our bylaws um now the shells pounded the marines but also their amtrak scaring the shit out of the men operating them what on one yellow beach so named due to the massive amount of urine rapidly filling the pants of the people landing there the amtrak didn't even stick around long enough to unload ammo for the marines or their heavy weapons like machine guns or mortars they just like get the fuck out we're leaving speaking of piss actually i i found something out that's always a good way to start a story i found something out kind of weird um apparently there's a thing with like

dudes who put up drywall and everything because like obviously they're on the stilts and stuff and like they'll piss in a plastic bottle and put it in people's walls and just like plaster over it and just like leave it as a surprise for the next renovator yeah it's called insulation tom you're you live in the uk you never would have heard of it insulating my home with balls of piss entire battalions got pinned down after only advancing a few yards inland and then within the few hours of the first wave all all four battalion commanders of the Marines were wounded or killed in rapid succession. Saito was shocked, however, to see all of this. The Marines kept crawling forward and assaulted unsupported directly at his face and towards

the village of Churon, Kanoa. It was the first time that American forces had actually ever attacked a Japanese settlement on foot. By noon, pretty much all of the senior officers of the 6th Marine Division were dead or wounded, as well as their rank and file absorbing a full 35% casualty rate. Soon, Divisional Commander Colonel James Risley was spot promoting young officers to fill these roles,

leading to one example of a platoon commander, that being the lowest ranking lieutenant possible, being in charge of an entire battalion because he was the last one standing how exactly do like promotions in the middle of battle work i mean it's kind of uh you'll either be told over the radio or and most likely you'll realize like i am the only officer left i have no choice once again this is just like call of duty you know you get a kill streak you get some points and then you like you get an xp boost and suddenly you're a new rank

in the middle of the battle that's right except the xp boost is all of your uh fellow like officers just getting mincemeat yeah you absorb their power meanwhile the eighth marines attacked an area called aentna Point, a heavily forested part of the island that Saito had filled with machine gun bunkers in such a way he could fire down at the length of the beachhead. Previously, Marines had slugged it out with Japanese in defense jungle fighting and learned a valuable lesson. Shotguns are pretty fun.

So a mostly shotgun-wielding force of Marines blew through a Fetna Point, capturing it. To the south of them, other Marines were trying to capture a concrete boat landing. Not because they wanted to use it for launching a boat or whatever, but they knew it was the only place to be able to land their Sherman tanks they had brought with them. Previous experience had shown them that beaches are not exactly the best terrain for tracked vehicles. And the Japanese had their own experience with American tanks, namely those of the flamethrower variety. And many of these were exactly that.

So they fought tooth and nail to push the Americans back from the boat landing before they got, you know, the flame-shooting Warhammer 40K tanks rolling up on them. There's just like a Marine commander still on the boat. They're like sacrificing psychers to like feel his power and he's like send the flamethrower tanks that's right because of this many of the landing craft carrying the tanks are immediately targeted and soon the japanese gunners saw them and sank them before they made it to shore now probably the craziest thing that happened on the beach was a near point blank artillery duel the marines quickly landed two battalions of 75 millimeter

howitzers as well as three 105mm howitzers, as well as three 105mm howitzers, whose crews set them up within a few minutes, all while under direct fire. They then began a direct fire duel with the dug-in Japanese artillery only a few hundred yards away, like something out of the 1800s. The Japanese commander, Saito, also favored constant counterattacks in order to keep the Americans on their toes rather than let them sit behind defenses. However, Saito wasn't about to order bonsai charges because he thought they'd be wasteful, rather than he favored well-led and well-planned out counterattacks using tanks that the Japanese also had on the island. That didn't always happen, though, as commanders took it upon themselves to order

smaller bonsai charges towards the Marinesines using the smaller commands under them though some soldiers knew saito's orders and simply wouldn't join in when some junior officer drew his sword one example given was one japanese sergeant kind of pump faked a junior officer when he ordered a bonsai charge acting like he was totally going to follow him only then when when the lieutenant ran by he just sat down and watched him run off into the distance that's a very fuck you energy yeah an uncommon in the japanese imperial army yeah by sundown over 20 000 americans had created a beachhead that extended 10 000 yards long and a thousand yards deep which sounds impressive but it was actually supposed to be double that by now it was now thataito decided it was time for a massive counterattack, and he completely fucked it up.

He put his tanks and thousands of infantry under the command of Tirashi Hirakushi, who was a public affairs officer. No idea why he chose him. Then the soldiers were given their regimental banner to inspire him, until someone

told Saito that the guy he put in command had no fucking idea what he was doing. So he was fired. Saito replaced him. The new officer who led the counterattack was a combat leader, and he inspired his men by jumping up onto the turret of the lead tank, pulling his sword out and waving it around in the air to inspire his men. The tank was immediately hit by an American artillery shell and exploded, killing him on the spot. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh, that's like...

That must have been so comedic to see. This guy, he's just jumping up and you see him waving and rallying the troops, then in the blink of an eye, he's just evaporated. Banzai! Ah, fuck! Now leaderless, the rest of the Japanese counterattack surged forward,

appearing seemingly out of nowhere in the middle of the darkness, only 100 yards from Marine lines. They ran directly into dozens of machine gun positions, destroying them before they could achieve anything. The second day of the invasion wasn't marked by an American advance, but rather a consolidation of what they had.

U.S. Army soldiers were floated in to reinforce the Marines after the invasion of Guam was postponed and they could be flexed over. They shipped in supplies and reinforcements, as well as five-gallon drums of ice cream, because why not? However, the Army's landing on the beach was completely botched. Nobody had told the Navy that the Army was coming ashore, meaning when they tried to land, they just kept crashing into the coastal vessels that were already there. Naval officers got on the bullhorn and started yelling across the ocean, demanding to know who the fuck was hitting them and why. The process took hours, and by the time the army finally got there, they had been stuck at sea for hours, vomiting from seasickness and just exhausted. However, the Japanese continued their constant unrelenting counterattacks and artillery.

By the time the sun went down on day two, 50% of the Marines officers had become casualties, killed or wounded. Then that night, Saito launched another large-scale counterattack with thousands of men and tanks, this time under Takashi Goto. Well, it launched at night, but it actually wasn't supposed to. Saito ordered it to start at 5pm, but Gato was given soldiers from several different army units, but also the navy, and he had no idea where they all were. It took him so long to try to organize something that looked like an attacking force that didn't start until 3 a.m i don't think i've been that late for anything before then any and all surprise was ruined when gato mounted a tank and passed orders to attack the only way he could due to complete lack of radios he used a fucking bugle he literally announced his attack to the americans so it wasn't as much as a surprise but it was more successful.

They broke through the Marine line in several places, and it led to probably one of the most Marine things I'd ever read about. A Japanese tank ran over a Marine foxhole, so one of the Marines

waited for the tank to keep going, loaded his grenade launcher, and attempted to shoot at the tank from behind. I don't know why he would have thought this worked. The grenade bounced off, flew right back at him him and exploded in his face nearly killing him how does a grenade explode in your face and not kill you he like he managed to duck in time like he was wounded but

not killed by his own grenade that he shot again at a tank. He put too many points into agility so he was able to dodge it. That's right. Once the Marine artillery got dialed in, the Japanese attack got blown to pieces, something made worse by US Navy destroyers who began to fire off what they're called star shells, so they're like giant illumination rounds that turn pitch darkness into broad daylight.

So the one advantage the Japanese had was quickly eliminated. Marines the one advantage that the Japanese had was quickly eliminated. Marines were so close to the Japanese that things quickly devolved into bayonet swords and literal shit-talking as Marines screamed at them in the few words of Japanese that they knew, which were all, of course, curse

words, and the Japanese did the exact same thing in English. During one of these nighttime bonsai charges, we get one of the strangest stories of a last stain in US Army history, a guy named Benjamin Solomon, a former private turned dentist. He had been assigned to be a field surgeon due to the lack of available medical personnel, which sure, he went to medical school, close enough. During one of the bonsai charges, the Japanese smashed through a section of the American front line where Solomon's field

hospital was only about 50 yards away, putting him directly in the way of the coming attack. Solomon ordered all of the wounded who could leave to get the fuck out, and he would stay behind to cover their withdrawal and defend the wounded men that couldn't move. The dentist then took up a rifle and defended his hospital. When his rifle ran out of ammo, he found a machine gun and manned it alone. And nobody's entirely sure what happened next, but when soldiers fought their way back and retook the hospital, they found Solomon dead next to his machine gun, wounded over 70 times with bullets and bayonets, and in front of him were the dead bodies of at least 100 Japanese soldiers. Solomon became the only third Jewish man in American history to receive the Medal of Honor,

though they almost didn't give it to him. As a doctor, he was legally considered a non-combatant meaning he was not allowed to carry a machine gun or use one in combat uh so it took until 2002 before the medal of honor was finally approved and he somehow he's not even the only dentist to get a medal of honor he's the third yeah see the dentists are used to holding that drill, you know, drilling into your face. They're not afraid to get the mack out. The dentists are used to being surrounded by misery and that everybody doesn't want to talk to them.

So they have a lot of pent-up anger. It's like in the movie Whole Nine Yards where they keep joking that dentists kill themselves a lot. The Japanese attack broke by first light and they withdrew towards Mount Tipo. Dozens of Japanese tanks and nearly 1,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, and they gained nothing. After this, Holland Smith, the commander of the Marines, sent his forces to the southern part of the island, where he planned to cut north through the highlands along with more Marine units and the U.S. Army's 27th Infantry would secure their flanks towards Osolito Air Base.

The south of Saipan was not where the Japanese wanted to defend. Saito took one look at the map, saw it was mostly flat farmland, and decided to order a fighting retreat. Saito kept expecting the Japanese fleet to come busting through, breaking a hole through the U.S. Navy, landing reinforcements and supplies, both of which he badly needed. However, that was not to be. The attempt to do so was eventually called the Battle of the Philippine Sea, nicknamed the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, and ended in a crushing Japanese defeat from which the Imperial Navy would never recover from. So, Navy, gone. Marine General Holland Smith orders men to sweep to the south, and the U.S. Army's 165th Infantry Regiment captured the airfield, promptly renaming it Conroy Airfield, after their

previously murdered commander, who died during the invasion of Macon. And one of the most petty things we've probably talked about before, when U.S. Army troops moved off the airfield toward Nafutan Ridge, the Marines moved in and then renamed the airfield after a dead Marine instead. Now, this is where we're going to talk about the feud between the Army Commander Ralph Smith and the Marine Commander Holland Smith. Yes, they're both named Smith. I'm going to go by their first names to make this easier. For starters, Holland didn't want the Army to be with his Marines at all.

He actually did the same thing at Tarawa, which we talked about back in our episode then. And Ralph was tasked with falling under his command. Ralph's unit, the 27th, was actually a unit of the New York National Guard, even though he himself was from Nebraska. He then fought in World War I. By all accounts, he was a level-headed, chill guy who hardly raised his voice at all. Holland was not that kind of person. He was born in Alabama, well-known for being a loudmouth prick who drank too much. And he probably really hated the army because after he finished law school, he tried to become an officer in the army, but was rejected. So he settled for the Marines, a branch he had never

previously heard of up until that point. The two had met before during the invasion of Macon, where Holland screamed at Ralph that his men weren't aggressive enough, saying they were too slow, too cautious. But in reality, that's not what that was. That's just how the army fought. They would advance much more slowly. They'd probe enemy defenses and scout ahead and only order attack when they thought they had figured out everywhere the enemy could be and could call in artillery to support their attack, while Holland demanded they fight like Marines, sprinting forward on the attack no matter what, scouting be damned. This began to rear its head again as the Marines and the soldiers advanced towards Mount Tapachow, which the main Japanese

defenses were anchored in. The Marines rapidly advanced while the army did not, owing to their very different tactics. Furthermore, when Holland gave orders for Ralph's forces to advance, he didn't bother to actually look at the terrain they would be advancing over. Soldiers of the force had advanced through steep valleys and ridges that had been lined with both homemade and naturally made caves, which the Japanese had reinforced and used as defensive points, however every single one would be fought to the death. This, of course, slowed the soldiers down more. These caves, ridgelines, and valleys became hell for the soldiers, and they earned nicknames like Hell's Pocket, Death Valley, and Purple Heart Ridge.

As the soldiers were ground into a meat-like paste, Holland complained to Ralph's boss, General Standiford Jarman. That is a name. That name alert, yeah. He was moving too slow and therefore bogging down the entire operation as the Marines had to keep waiting for him. Ralph told the general that, you know,

I'll lead the next day's attack into the valleys and ridges myself and prove to you that my soldiers could advance, but it didn't matter. The Japanese defenses were just too thick, too stubborn, and again, a system of caves. Like, there's no quick way to advance through this.

While the Marines... We're down there with the Morlocks. Yeah, they're fighting with the goblins of Moria or whatever. And, you know, the problem was that the Japanese brought a Balrog. But while the Marines would be much more likely to skip by defensive points and keep pushing forward, the Army wouldn't and wouldn't instead secure everything. The Marines were still facing stiff opposition as well, but not nearly in the same kind of terrain. And they moved much faster, causing the American front line to kind of sag where the Army was stationed.

So Holland asked Admiral Spruance to fire Ralph, and he did. Ralph was fired so quickly that he didn't even have time to tell the incoming commander what he has to prepare for. He was immediately kicked off the island an hour after he was fired. And this was explicitly at the demand of Holland. So this led to a massive blow up between the services, an investigation, a board of inquiry, even more than one all out screaming match between army and navy brass. In the end, it found the navy technically did have the regular like they're within their rights to fire Ralph because he was a subordinate in that at that point in time. was a subordinate at that point in time, but they found that Holland did it based on just his simple hatred of the army, rather than having anything to do with the facts on the ground, because Holland and the Marines as a whole lack the ability to actually command and coordinate a large-scale offensive like the one in Saipan, because they'd never done it before. The soldiers, now demoralized

by their commander's firing, along with the obvious fact that their Navy and Marine bosses hated them, were now forced to clear the same areas with a new commander that barely had any idea what he was dealing with. Soldiers and Marines are forced to adopt slow, violent tactics to deal with them. According to one Marine, quote, quite often there'd be multiple cave openings, each protecting another. Lying down heavy cover fire, our specialists would advance to the mouth of the cave. A satchel bomb would be thrown into the mouth and then followed by a loud blast of the dynamite. But there were hundreds, possibly thousands of these caves, large and small, each of them defended by a dozen or hundreds of Japanese soldiers fighting to the death. These operations caused Marines and soldiers to absorb thousands of casualties in just a week as they fought towards Mount Tapachao. and it finally fell to the American forces.

American soldiers fighting the Pacific also ran into something they weren't prepared for, civilians. Up until that point, the vast majority of the fighting had been over barren specks of rock that if they ever had a civilian population, the Japanese had deported them somewhere to be slaves. had a civilian population. The Japanese had deported them somewhere to be slaves. So on Saipan, they ran into their first actual population that hadn't been. And they had no training or guidance to deal with them whatsoever. And the Japanese took advantage of that. Japanese soldiers launched ambushes from behind human civilian shields, which caught the Americans by surprise. The civilians had also been told for years that American soldiers were serial murderers, rapists, and barbarians, and you should never allow yourself to fall into their captivity. So many civilians, Japanese or native, worked with the Imperial Army to help

defend the island. This led to a very gray area where some units fired on civilians on site, while others didn't, as there was no orders one way or another. Largely, human empathy did shine through to the shock of, I'm assuming, everybody listening to this. Americans, Marines, soldiers, sailors alike evacuated most civilians they came across if they came across them while they were still alive, trying to get them out of harm's way. One Marine remembered having to virtually tackle and restrain a Japanese mother who was holding a baby because they were sure they were about to be horrifically butchered by the American forces, as they'd been told. The two of them had been wounded and the Marines were trying to give them first aid. And they were finally able to force

them to get into a jeep and get them to a field hospital. And this isn't to say that there weren't civilian casualties caused by Americans in Saipan, because there was. For example, there were a lot of bunkers built to protect civilians by the Japanese that lay spread out throughout the entire island. Unfortunately, they look the exact same as military bunkers. Yeah, that seems like a poor design choice. I don't think the Japanese cared. Probably an intentional design choice yeah probably American forces in the Pacific again

had no experience dealing with civilians on the battlefield and it is 1944 even if they did it probably would have ended the same way thousands of civilians were killed by flamethrowers and hand grenades because Americans came through up to their bunkers assuming they were military bunkers

and only discovered they were civilian bunkers. When it was too late. Though one guy. Guy Gabaldon. Was a Mexican American from East LA. Who had been adopted by a Japanese family. Early in his life. And he ended up saving more lives.

Than probably any other American. During the entire war. Pacific or European. I was about to say, I'd say the food in his family's house fucking slapped. Oh yeah. Now, Guy was a Marine and had a pretty important skill that nobody else had. He spoke

fluent Japanese, owing to the fact that he had spent years going to Japanese language school with his adopted family. So, Guy snuck out in the middle of the night on his own and began yelling in Japanese as the soldiers and civilians liked to surrender. They had been lied to and they were not going to be hurt. At first, his commander thought he was fucking insane because, of course, he did.

But then one night he came back with 50 prisoners of war, which is unheard of in the Pacific theater. After that, his commander gave him permission to sneak out at night and try to convince people to surrender. Over 1,000 soldiers and civilians surrendered to Guy, earning him the nickname the Pied Piper of Saipan. Just so the impact of Guy's actions is fully understood, only 15,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians survived and surrendered at the end of the battle. He was responsible for a full 1,500 of those. And some people question his accounts, but Marine and Army historians alike all confirm his actions. At the time of this podcast, the citation used to award him his Navy Cross is under

review to be upgraded to a Medal of Honor. Now, by the end of June, it was pretty obvious to everybody that the Japanese side, that they were screwed. The Navy had been ethered at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, something they learned when the US Navy returned to Saipan to continue bombing the shit out of them. They lost thousands of men and all was lost. Saito was cordoned in the very north of the island where he was planning their final defense. The Japanese soldiers who survived this long were greeted by intense shortages of just about everything.

The garrison had no more food or water. They were reduced to drinking unsafe puddle water wherever they could find it. They're eating grass and tree bark. And, you know, this... Oh, no, not the grass. Everything comes back to eating grass, baby. Live fast, eat grass. And then, you know, disease.

They all had awful, awful diseases at this point. Eventually, Saitito's final defense was again constant suicidal counter-attacks on june 27th 500 japanese soldiers broke through the american defenses around the isley airfield and once inside they set planes on fire blew up ammo and fuel dumps and tried to do as much damage before they were finally wiped out the same thing happened at the Marine occupied city of Garapon, which used to be home to 15,000 people. And it was now completely like deserted and abandoned.

And Japanese soldiers stormed the town and try to do the same thing before they're wiped out. Now it was pretty obvious at this point, like Holland Smith was like, there's gotta be a bonsai charge coming. Their backs are against the wall. They have nowhere left to go. And it turned out he was right. Admiral Nagumo and General Saito had decided that a mass bonsai charge was their last course of action, though neither of them would be taking

part in it. When they were asked if they would like to lead the attack, Saito, the army officer, was about to say yes. When Admiral Nagumo, a naval officer, said, no thank you. I would rather commit ritual suicide instead. Of course, meaning, you know, the ritualistic belly-cutting of Harakiri. The entire day was spent planning for the attack. The soldiers were short of rifles, so like a collection of,

this strange collection of thousands of soldiers, sailors, a couple civilians all armed themselves with rifles, swords, homemade bamboo spears, rocks, knives anything they get their hands on everybody was included including people that were like walking along on crutches having previously their

legs blown off. So at 4am on July 7th the Japanese launched what would be their largest bonsai charge of the entire war down the northwestern shore of the island. 5,000 men charged directly towards the position of the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment, the 27th Infantry Division, and supporting Marine units. For the defending soldiers, it came out of nowhere. They described it like the night itself had come alive and begun screaming at them. The American frontline positions broke immediately,

and they were forced to withdraw as mortar tubes and artillery blasted the Japanese so quickly their guns became red-hot and unusable. Isolated American positions fired their machine guns so fast their barrels melted. Nothing slowed the Japanese charge down. One American sergeant, Thomas Baker, was wounded, and rather than slow the rest of his men down by having them carry him, he told them to fuck off, leave him behind, and just leave him a pistol. They gave him a Model 1911 pistol, which held eight bullets. Hours later, when soldiers fought their way back to where they left him,

they found his body stabbed to shit and back with eight dead japanese soldiers in front of him he did not miss a single shot he got that last turn yeah another soldier lieutenant colonel william o'brien it's for you tom found his entire unit surrounded and cut off during the charge. His men had run out of ammo, so O'Brien ran up and down the line, murdering Japanese soldiers with a shovel. Yes! When he was wounded, he gave up his position on an

evacuation mission that had broken through the lines. Instead, he climbed on top of a jeep, armed with a machine gun, told his unit to withdraw, and he would cover them. The last anyone saw him, he was alive, firing non-stop into thousands of Japanese soldiers. I assume

wearing like aviator sunglasses and a cigarette in his mouth to complete the look. American forces were pushed back for hours until the charge finally lost steam. Having been machine gun shelled, stabbed, and shoveled as they advanced, the Japanese petered out, leaving behind 4,000 dead.

The Americans, in just a few hours, lost 1,000 of their own. Meanwhile, back at the Japanese command cave complex, Saito had shot himself in the head. Well, he tried to shoot himself in the head. He couldn't muster the courage. His aide had to shoot him. Yeah, he made the technical mistake of trying to shoot himself in the temple rather than up through the roof of your mouth. He couldn't muster the balls to do it himself,

so he had to give it to his assistant. Like, hey, could you handle this for me? Then Nagumo had one last final fuck you to the army. A soldier stepped forward to offer to do the same thing for him, but he refused, saying, I need to retain my honor. Go find a sailor so they can shoot me. A soldier stepped forward to offer to do the same thing for him, but he refused, saying, I need to retain my honor. Go find a sailor so they can shoot me. So he did.

So that is how the once proud naval commander of the attack on Pearl Harbor died, thirsty and starving in a cave on a remote island. At this point, organized resistance all but ended. Isolated pockets of Japanese soldiers would go on to fight for weeks, though. Then, the Marines and soldiers of the U.S. military discovered probably one of the most horrific things American ground forces would see during the Pacific War.

Content warning for this one, guys. High on Marpee Point, in the northernmost corner of the islands, thousands of civilians had perched themselves on a cliff face. in the northernmost corner of the islands, thousands of civilians had perched themselves on a cliff face. Fueled by Japanese propaganda about the horrible things the Marines and the soldiers would do to them should they fall into American hands, they began to throw themselves over the cliffs into the rocks and the ocean below. Entire families huddled together and blew themselves with hand grenades. Watching this entire thing unfold in front of them, Americans brought Sipanese and Japanese civilians who had surrendered to the Americans to come out and yell at

them through bullhorns that they had been lied to. Don't kill yourself. Come join us. But it didn't work. Soldiers and Marines tried to get closer to stop the mass suicide from continuing, but they saw that it only caused the civilians to kill themselves faster. There were also stragglers from the Imperial

Army amongst them, encouraging them to kill themselves and in many cases throwing them off the cliffs themselves. Unable to stop what was happening and having no recourse, American forces watched as around 5,000 men, women, and children committed mass suicide over the course of the next day and a half. Today, these sites are memorials on Saipan known as Suicide and Banzai Cliff. By the course of the next day and a half. Today, these sites are memorials on Saipan known as Suicide and Bonsai Cliff. By the end of the battle, virtually the entire Japanese garrison had been destroyed, and for the Americans,

it was the most deadly Pacific battle of the war so far. So there's two very important other battles that are coming. Of the 71,000 men in total who landed, 3,000 were dead, another 10,000 were wounded. Of the wounded, there's actually future Hollywood star Lee Marvin, who was shot twice and got shrapnel in his ass cheeks. Yeah, he got that shiny metal ass. The fall of Saipan was devastating for the Empire of Japan. Now American bombers are only 1,000 miles away from the home islands, and soon B-29 bombers

would be flying out of it, raining death and destruction onto the cities of the home front without end. Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo resigned, along with his entire cabinet, against the wishes of the emperor. He was replaced by Kuniaki Kosio, a former general of the Imperial Army. Though at this point, the civilian government had no power and japan would be a full military dictatorship until the end of the war naval advisor to the emperor osami nagano upon hearing about the fall of saipan told the emperor soon hell will be upon us and he was correct yeah so like there's a lot of small other end notes here uh that the battle of saipan would bleed over into the decision to nuke japan and that is the belief that they would be fighting the entire country because they saw

how the civilians in saipan reacted to american soldiers so like this battle has a lot of other strange ripple effects and i'm not going to go into like obviously the full reasoning the full reasoning and tactics and everything of n of nuking Japan until, you know, I eventually do for a series, but like this had, this made a lot of people believe like these people are completely brainwashed. Look what they did.

And like, that is a very simplistic view of this. A lot of it, like this was a mass suicide, but also a mass murder committed by the Imperial Japanese army. Like the people who didn't want to kill themselves were forced to do so like it's absolutely awful um every time i think i've heard the worst thing that the japanese did during world war ii you always seem to just like find

something that's way more horrific i consider that a resume bullet. Thank you. Uh, no, it's, um, I mean, they, the Japanese Imperial military and the government doesn't get enough credit for how awful of a month of monsters they were, at least not on the Western side of the world. Asia knows full well.

Um, but like, it seems to, you know, cause we, the, the Western education of this stuff, at least in the United States, I can't speak for any other country or the UK or whatever, really likes to focus on the European front because it's cleaner. I mean, even though the Nazis were involved and they're, you know, the historical monsters, like it's very easy to talk about the grand victories of Europe.

to talk about the grand victories of Europe, you know, these clean, normal military operations rather than like, oh yeah, we just ethered 2000 Marines over a rock with nobody on it. Like it doesn't ring the same way. That's why the, the,

the mythos of the Pacific front tends to focus on Okinawa, Iwo Jima and the nukes, like clear cut military operations, which were horrific, but comparable the nukes. Like, clear-cut military operations which were horrific but comparable to something in Europe. I think. But, Tom,

that is the Battle of Saipan. Fuck me. Yeah, Roy Keane was right to leave in 2002. Now, we've come to the end of our show. Please, plug your show. Listen to Beneath the end of our show please plug your show listen to Beneath the Skin the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing

like we do cool episodes about different like tattoo related stuff like Russian prison tattoos we have an episode coming up with a Maori tattooer called Te Rangitu who that's going to come out and like see this is coming out yeah that should be coming out after this episode goes out

publicly and so we're going to do a really long episode with him talking about you know the history behind Polynesian specifically Maori Maori tattooing, the kind of metaphysical, spiritual stuff, and also like the cultural legacy of it and its, you know, modern history. So if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, check it out. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me here today. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. You get five plus years of bonus content, Discord access, stickers, access to pre-orders on our merchandise, or leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And failing that,

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when you invade a beach, make sure to do bunny hops.