With the Marines on Saipan: Robert L. Sherrod

Early in the morning of June 4, 1944, Time magazine correspondent Robert L. Sherrod had his sleep interrupted when a telephone operator at the Moana Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, called to wake him an hour after midnight. By 1:30 a.m. Sherrod was in a taxi on his way to the naval air station on Ford Island, where he boarded a PB2Y Coronado flying boat for his fourth trip into war since Pearl Harbor on his way to Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands.

Three days before, Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson, the army’s Central Pacific commander, had told Sherrod during a meeting in the general’s office at Fort Shafter outside Honolulu that the “serious phase of the war in the Pacific” was about to begin, with an ambitious schedule of hitting Saipan on June 15 and, three days later, Guam. The Marianas operation involved 775 ships, more than 100,000 infantrymen, and nearly 25,000 sailors and was, by far, noted Sherrod, the largest the Americans had attempted in the Pacific. “Saipan is a sort of Japanese Pearl Harbor,” he said, “where soldiers, marines and flyers are staged for the entire West and South Pacific. Said one high-ranking officer: ‘If we can land on Saipan we can land anywhere there are Japanese.’”

The afternoon following his arrival on Eniwetok, Sherrod attended the opening of the base’s officers club (only beer and gin available) situated in a two-story Quonset hut with screened-in porches and a long, elaborately illustrated bar. Guests at the club included a host of top brass, including Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet and “on-the-spot commander of the land, sea, and air forces involved,” who told Sherrod that he expected the Saipan operation to be “tough ashore, but I’ve got a lot of faith in the Marines.” Even more impressive than the admiral, however, were a dozen nurses from the hospital ship Bountiful, who became the first white women to set foot on Eniwetok. “To men hungry for the sight of a woman the nurses looked good,” said Sherrod, “even if they wore unflattering slacks instead of frills.”

For the invasion of Saipan, Sherrod had been assigned to accompany the Second Marine Division, the same troops he had been with during the Battle of Tarawa. Brigadier General Merritt A. Edson, assistant division commander, was a Sherrod friend, so the correspondent asked to be assigned to his transport, the USS Bolivar, and agreed to go ashore with the general on D-Day. Sherrod’s roommate on the ship was another Tarawa veteran, Lieutenant Colonel William K. Jones, the youngest battalion commander in the Marine Corps. “This is not going to be easy,” Edson told Sherrod. “Maybe I’m wrong and I hope I am, but you know I’ve got a reputation as a pessimist.” Sherrod noted that because the victories at Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands had been “easy,” some correspondents had the opinion that the rest of the Pacific war should be a pushover. “The correspondents aren’t the only ones in that frame of mind,” Edson said, with a fleeting smile, recalled Sherrod.

The night before the landings, a marine colonel predicted to the correspondent: “I’ve just got a hunch this is going to be the easiest one of all.” Sherrod noticed that most of the marines were less tense than they had been before Tarawa. “An air of quiet confidence permeated the conversations of these veterans,” he noted. “Every man, I supposed, considered the possibility of death, but nobody spoke of it. Death is something that happens to the other fellow. If men did not believe that, they would be more reluctant to go into battle.” 

Many times Sherrod had heard of soldiers who had a premonition of death, but he had never talked to one. “I never heard a man say that he felt he was going to get it,” he said. One episode stuck in Sherrod’s mind. A few days before the invasion, a destroyer had come alongside the Bolivar to deliver mail for the troops, but had mistakenly unloaded a sack that should have gone to the Third Battalion, Eighth Marines. “A lot of men in 3/8 will die without ever having read that last letter from home,” thought Sherrod.

On June 15, the morning of the landings, Saipan looked to Sherrod, peering at it from the deck of the Bolivar, like “a low-lying prehistoric monster whose high, rising spine was Mt. [Mount] Tapotchau.” On the Marines’ maps the island seemed to be shaped like a pistol pointing north toward Tokyo, he noted, with the Americans attacking on the west side, along the top of the pistol’s butt. The Second Division was poised to hit the beach north of the sugar-mill town of Charan Kanoa, while the Fourth Division hit the southern edge of the town (the Twenty-Seventh Division was held in reserve). Unlike what had happened during the Battle of Tarawa, there were plenty of amtracs available to ferry the marines ashore, and, because of the “gallant men” of the underwater demolition teams, which correspondents were forbidden to write about at the time, they knew many details about the beach and reef conditions.

At 7:45 a.m. Sherrod climbed into LCVP Number PA-34-25 with Edson and his staff. In a few minutes they had transferred to Subchaser Number 1052 and began rolling in toward the rendezvous point. “It was still several hours before we would start for shore,” Sherrod recalled, “but the old feeling of anxiety was already there: ‘Will I ever see this ship again; will I ever make it all the way down that long, watery road from ship to shore?’”

From six miles offshore, Saipan began to “look like a furnace seen through a haze,” with American warships closing in and firing with their guns. Even from 3,000 yards, Sherrod could smell the strong, acrid stench of gunpowder. After a shell splashed 150 yards off the subchaser’s bow, Sherrod heard its captain, Lieutenant Arthur Phillips of Detroit, Michigan, note: “I think we’re being sniped at.” Shortly before 9:00 a.m., Sherrod witnessed his first death on Saipan as a fighter aircraft, a navy Hellcat, was hit by Japanese antiaircraft fire, flared briefly, and plummeted into the water, which, he said, “extinguished the flame as quickly as it did the life of the pilot.”

The first of the more than 700 amtracs involved in the invasion made it to shore at 8:44 a.m. and within twenty minutes the Americans had approximately 8,000 assault troops on Saipan. A Japanese sergeant who witnessed the invasion remembered that the enemy advanced “like a swarm of grasshoppers. The American soldiers were all soaked. Their camouflage helmets looked black. They were so tiny wading ashore. I saw flames shooting up from American tanks hit by Japanese fire.”

Still waiting to land, Sherrod and Edson’s staff transferred to an amtrac, Number 410, and took cover (except for the general) as best they could as enemy artillery fire splashed in the water around them. Sherrod noticed he was crouching on boxes containing 81-mm mortar shells, and he figured a direct hit on his boat might “preclude the necessity of deciding which way to swim.”

Sherrod’s amtrac reached shore at 2:30 p.m. and those onboard jumped over its side and ran for cover to a tank trap a few yards inland. For the rest of the day and the night, Sherrod was in considerable doubt whether he might leave the island alive. “An artillery shell or a mortar shell—I have never found anyone who could definitely tell them apart as they exploded—landed near us every three seconds for the first twenty minutes,” he recalled. Most landed in the water, some hit the beach, and all missed hitting inside the seven-foot-deep tank trap where Sherrod and others had taken cover. At a nearby aid station, there were fourteen casualties, and the water that seeped through the sand “was already red with blood,” noted the correspondent.

A few yards to the right of the aid station, five enemy soldiers lay dead in a hole next to their dismantled machine gun. “It was more Japs than I saw in any other spot that first day,” said Sherrod. “They had evidently been taking their machine gun apart for withdrawal inland when a bomb or shell scored a direct hit on their hole.” As a souvenir-hunting corpsman tried to remove a bayonet from a Japanese’s scabbard, a colonel yelled at him to stop: “You’ll get yourself mixed up with a booby trap. Now, goddam it, leave him alone!”

The fierce Japanese shelling continued as the first day ashore ended. From 8:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m., from 11:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m., and from 4:00 a.m. until 5:00 a.m., Sherrod counted one shell bursting every five seconds, but Sherrod said nobody in his area was hit during the night. “Men in holes are hard to hit,” he said.

The correspondent had a brief scare, however, as he dug his foxhole in an incident that highlighted the battle’s brutality. A Marine near him shouted that he had seen an enemy soldier under some nearby logs. The command post’s security officer handed a concussion grenade to a marine and told him to blast the enemy from his hole. Before he could, a skinny, short Japanese soldier jumped out of his hiding place, waving a bayonet. An American grenade knocked him down, but he struggled up, Sherrod said, and pointed his bayonet into his stomach and attempted to cut himself open in hara-kiri fashion. He failed because a Marine shot him with his carbine. “But, like all Japs, he took a lot of killing,” Sherrod reported. “Even after four bullets had thudded into his body he rose to one knee. Then the American shot him through the head and the Jap was dead.”

Sherrod’s first night on Saipan held none of the terror that had gripped him his first night on Betio Island during the Battle of Tarawa. Partly, it came from having become accustomed to getting shot at. Any man in combat, he noted, “begins to adopt a sort of ‘Is it mine or ain’t it?’ philosophy, after a while,” but it also came from the Americans’ ability to keep the battlefront illuminated with star shells so they could anticipate any counterattacks. Japanese records captured after the battle reported that as soon as its night-attack units went forward, the Americans would call in star shells that “practically turn night into day. Thus the maneuvering of units is extremely difficult.”

Sherrod also had the comfort of what was for him, plenty of room, as there “was a solid 500 yards between the front lines and my hole in the sand,” he recalled. “That was better than the 20 feet we had at Tarawa. This time I got a few hours of sleep.”