Storm Landings: Epic Amphibious Battles in the Central Pacific

STORM LANDINGS

STORM

LANDINGS

EPIC AMPHIBIOUS BATTLES IN THE CENTRAL PACIFIC

Joseph H. Alexander

Naval Institute Press • Annapolis, Maryland

This electronic book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of

The United States Naval Academy Class of 1945

This book has been brought to publication by the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 1997 by Joseph H. Alexander

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Naval Institute Press paperback edition published in 2012.

ISBN: 978-1-61251-266-2

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Alexander, Joseph H.,

Storm landings : epic amphibious battles in the Central Pacific / Joseph H. Alexander.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. World War, 1939–1945—Amphibious operations. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Pacific Ocean. 4. Amphibious warfare. I. Title.

D773.A7 1997

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

First printing

Frontispiece: The Wave Breaks on the Beach by Kerr Eby (courtesy of U.S. Navy Combat Art Collection).

Epigraph on page vi taken from Saburo Hayashi and Alvin D. Coox, Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War (Marine Corps Association, 1959), page 110.

For Lt. Col. Robert Clark Caldwell, USMC (Ret.), 1933–1995

The tactics of the Americans called for hurling enormous firepower against the enemy and then making forced landings frontally. So-called storm landings were common American practice.

Col. Saburo Hayashi,

Imperial Japanese Army

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Rags to Riches

Chapter OneCracking a Tough Nut

Chapter TwoPacific Proving Ground

Chapter ThreeTurning Point at Tarawa

Chapter FourThe Marianas: Storming the Absolute National Defense Sphere

Chapter FiveSharpening the Amphibious Ax

Chapter SixBloody Peleliu

Chapter SevenIwo Jima: Storming Sulfur Island

Chapter EightOkinawa: Amphibious Capstone

Chapter NineCollision Course: The Planned Invasion of Kyūshū

Epilogue: Parting Shots

Appendix: Ten Unforgettable Amphibians

Textual Notes

Notes on Sources

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

Evolution of Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces

The Japanese Invasion of Guam

Japanese Type 98 (1929) 127-mm Dual-Purpose Gun

Japanese Beachfront Command Post

Quiet Lagoon

Chaos Reigned

Emergency MedEvac

Surprise Attack

Close Fire Support

Growth of Marine Corps Aviation

Changes in USMC Division Organization and Weapons

Japanese Antiboat Mines and Offshore Obstacles

Into the Jaws of Death

Japanese Model 1 (1941) 47-mm Antitank Gun

The Maestro

Evolution of Assault LVTs

Line of Departure

Logistical Masterpiece

Tactical Air Support Briefing

Japanese Mortars Used against U.S. Landing Forces

Thunder Road

Evolution of Amphibious Task Forces

Ebb Tide

Thomas J. Colley

Robert E. Galer

James L. Jones

Michael F. Keleher

Larry E. Klatt

Lewis J. Michelony Jr.

Eugene B. Sledge

Donald M. Weller

Maps

Tulagi and Gavutu

Pacific Theater

The Central and Northern Solomons

Betio Island, Tarawa

Saipan

Guam

Tinian

New Guinea

Peleliu

Iwo Jima

Okinawa

Kyūshū (Operation Olympic)

Foreword

Amphibious operations—the movement of armed forces over oceans to be disembarked from ships at sea onto a foreign shore—are as old as the history of warfare itself. However, not until World War II were the military art and science of conducting an assault—the most violent and near-final phase of an attack—perfected from ships at sea against fortified positions. Storm Landings, Col. Joe Alexander’s second work on amphibious operations in the Pacific during World War II, is the story of that evolution. It is a story worth reading not only because it is told well by a talented writer-historian, or because it is an exciting and instructive look at the past, but more important, it is worth reading because its lessons are a window to the future.

The United States is a maritime nation. Although we have neighbors across our land borders to both the north and south, our most continuous vital interests lie to the east and west—across the great expanses of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Since World War II we have maintained large, standing armies and air forces in foreign lands across these oceans, but that era is drawing to a close. In the decades to come, our national security strategy will change. For a variety of political and economic reasons, far fewer American forces will be permanently stationed in foreign countries. However, our national interests will continue to dictate the need for forward presence, alliance-maintenance, and immediate crisis response through the employment of naval and military forces from ships at sea in places far distant from our shores.

The great majority of these prospective operations will not be the violent, intense storm landings of the past, but some will. Whether they are or not, the perfection of the coordinated assaults from the sea Colonel Alexander has characterized as storm landings in World War II provided the blueprint that has shaped the capabilities of our current and emerging Navy of the twenty-first century and the doctrine by which land forces operate from these modern sea-bases now, as they will in the future.

Thus, the true value of Colonel Alexander’s insights into the storm landings of the past lies in the relevance of the lessons derived from them to the future. In this, his contributions will be not just novel, they will be enduring.

Carl E. Mundy Jr.

General, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.)

Commandant of the Marine Corps, 1991–1995

Acknowledgments

This is a tribute to an extreme form of amphibious assault known as storm landings developed by American forces in the Central Pacific during the final two years of the war. I have defined storm landings as risky, long-range, large-scale, self-sustaining assaults executed against strong opposition and within the protective umbrella of fast carrier task forces. There were seven of these—Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa—and a potential eighth, Kyūshū.

I concentrate on these specific amphibious epics at the cost of other landings in other theaters. I even omit Operation Flintlock in the Marshalls, a campaign rich in strategic and doctrinal developments but not, by the above definition, a storm landing. I treat these other landings with full respect but not in detail, referring the reader to John A. Lorelli’s comprehensive To Foreign Shores. As a long-in-the-tooth amphibian myself, I have every admiration for any man of any service who ever landed on a hostile shore. By nature of the beast, there are no amphibious cake-walks. The work is extremely hazardous. Even under the most benign tactical conditions men drown, or get crushed by shifting cargo, or get run over by heavy equipment. Just getting safely ashore in the Pacific War was a minor triumph—storming ashore in the teeth of murderous Japanese fire added a dimension that today defies imagination.

This operational history also examines the desperate Japanese efforts to devise counteramphibious tactics and weaponry. The two antagonists were on a true collision course in southern Kyūshū. Operation Olympic, scheduled for November 1945, would have been—categorically—the bloodiest amphibious campaign of all.

This book is graced by the professional contributions of Mary Craddock Hoffman, who created the maps; Larry E. Klatt (himself a veteran of three storm landings), who sketched the Japanese weapons and defenses; Cindy Wheeler Lee, who illustrated the charts; and Bunichi Ohtsuka, who translated the original Japanese accounts for me.

As always, I benefited from the guidance of Brig. Gen. Edwin H. Simmons, USMC (Ret.), director of Marine Corps History and Museums, and Benis M. Frank, chief historian of the Marine Corps. Other military historians who provided support included Thomas B. Buell, Theodore L. Gatchel, John A. Lorelli, Dr. Allan R. Millett, Dr. Edward J. Drea, Dr. John Ray Skates, Richard B. Frank, Jon T. Hoffman, Dr. George F. Hofmann, Merrill L. Bartlett, Nathan Miller, Thomas J. Cutler, Henry I. Shaw Jr., James R. Davis, Joseph McNamara, and James C. Hitz.

Special thanks to these contributors: Gen. Carl E. Mundy Jr., USMC (Ret.), Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak, USMC (Ret.), the Honorable J. T. Slick Rutherford, William T. Ketcham, Nick Floros, Don C. Gorham, Douglas J. Colley, Dr. Eugene B. Sledge, Lewis J. Michelony Jr., Brig. Gen. Robert E. Galer, USMC (Ret.), Lt. Gen. James L. Jones Jr., USMC, Norma M. Crotty, Michael F. Keleher, M.D., and Col. Robert J. Putnam, USMC (Ret.).

In four years of researching and writing about the Pacific War, I’ve been blessed with exceptional editors, including Fred H. Rainbow and John G. Miller of Naval Institute Proceedings, Robert Cowley and John Tarkov of MHQ, William V. H. White of Leatherneck, Fred L. Schultz of Naval History, John E. Greenwood of Marine Corps Gazette, and Norman C. Stahl, chief creative director, Lou Reda Productions.

I also received invaluable research assistance from the following professionals: Naval Institute Press—Dr. Paul Wilderson, Linda W. O’Doughda, Randy Baldini, Susan Artigiani, Linda Cullen, and Susan Brook; U.S. Naval Institute—Paul Stillwell, Carol Mason, Mary Beth Straight-Kiss, Charles L. Mussi, Ann Hassinger; Marine Corps Historical Center—Evelyn A. Englander, Frederick J. Graboske, Danny A. Crawford, Robert V. Aquilina, Ann A. Ferrante, Lena M. Kaljot, Richard A. Long, Amy J. Cantin; Naval Historical Center—John Reilly, Kathy Lloyd; Marine Corps University—A. Kerry Strong; National Archives—Dr. Timothy K. Nenninger; Hoover Institution Archives—Linda Wheeler; Admiral Nimitz Museum—Helen McDonald; Pack Memorial Library, Asheville—Charles Cady Jr. I add thanks in particular to my gifted manuscript editor and indexer, Anne R. Gibbons, and to my astute proofreader, Barbara Johnson.

In the realm of close support, my thanks to Richard T. Poore, Stephen W. Woody, Edith H. Livengood, E. Gordon James, Lewis J. Kraus, my brother and fellow historian William T. Alexander, my son and California researcher, Kenneth B. Keg Alexander, and my wife, Gale, who patiently allowed storm landings to invade our mountain home and hearth these many months.

Errata

Page 76, map of Guam: The two points north and south of the Orote Peninsula are correctly spelled Asan and Facpi.

Page 108, paragraph two: The distance between Peleliu and Ulithi Atoll is about 400 miles.

Page 118, paragraph three: The Japanese defensive positions along the south defilade of The Point were hewn out of the coral face and armed with heavy machine guns and one notably effective 25-mm machine-cannon.

Page 147, paragraph four: The number of B-29 crewmen whose lives were probably saved when their crippled planes were able to make emergency landings on newly seized Iwo Jima is best estimated to be several thousand.

Page 194, paragraph two: The new landing craft control boats (LLCs) were specialized by virtue of being radar-equipped.

STORM LANDINGS

Prologue

Rags to Riches

Enemy task force of twenty ships attacking Tulagi, undergoing severe bombings, landing preparations under way; help requested.

Commander Japanese Forces,

Tulagi, 0705,

7 August 1942

The sudden appearance of an Allied task force in the Southern Solomons astonished the Japanese garrison scattered among the islands. Was it a raid? A feint? Or, heaven forbid, a real invasion? Excited Japanese officers scanned the threatening armada with field glasses, noting the presence of fully laden troop transports and cargo ships. They flinched as U.S. Navy F6F Hellcats and SBD Dauntless dive-bombers screeched overhead, realizing immediately that the Americans had committed their last remaining carriers to this operation. When waves of landing craft bearing heavily armed Marines converged on Tulagi’s undefended south coast the local commander knew he was in deep jeopardy. Radio Tulagi’s last message to Rabaul crackled over the airwaves a few minutes later: Enemy troop strength is overwhelming. We will defend to the last man.

Rear Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner’s Task Force 62 executed five separate landings in the Solomons on D-Day. Guadalcanal rightfully received the main effort, but four other landings occurred among the Florida Islands, nineteen miles north across a body of water soon to be known as Iron Bottom Sound.

The distinction of conducting the nation’s first offensive amphibious landing in the Pacific War went to Baker Company* of the 1st Battalion, 2d Marines, led by Capt. Edward J. Crane, USMC. Crane’s reinforced company of 252 officers and men splashed ashore from eight landing boats from the USS President Jackson (AP 37) at 0740 near Haleta on Florida Island. The Baker Company riflemen had the mission of securing the jungled peninsula to protect the left flank of Lt. Col. Merritt A. Edson’s 1st Raider Battalion during its assault on nearby Tulagi. This they promptly achieved.

Other American landings occurred in short order. The 1st Raiders charged ashore at 0800. Elements of the 1st Battalion, 2d Marines, seized Halavo Peninsula east of Tulagi half an hour later. To the south, the bulk of the 1st Marine Division landed over Red Beach on Guadalcanal at 0910. So far, so good. The Japanese defenders seemed too stunned to oppose the landings, although the 3d Kure Special Naval Landing Force on Tulagi soon recovered from its initial shock and began delivering a hot fire against the Raiders moving inland.

The Americans lacked sufficient landing craft to execute all five assaults simultaneously. As a consequence, the day’s fifth landing, the assault on the tiny islets of Gavutu and Tanambogo east of Tulagi, could not be mounted before 1400. The invaders had forfeited the element of surprise. To complicate matters further, Gavutu’s protective reefs permitted a landing approach only from the northeast. The waterborne route from the transport area to the target beach measured fourteen thousand yards—a two-hour transit against an eastern wind. The Americans, in short, telegraphed their punch, and the Japanese machine gunners had plenty of time to orient their killing zones.

Gavutu and Tanambogo were small, hilly islets, joined by the umbilical cord of a three-hundred-yard causeway. The existence of a major Japanese seaplane base made the islets a desirable secondary objective. Close to four hundred members of the Yokohama Air Group and the 3d Kure Special Naval Landing Force defended the two sites, many of them occupying prepared positions in hillside caves overlooking the flat beaches.

The mission of seizing first Gavutu and then Tanambogo went to the 1st Parachute Battalion, commanded by Maj. Robert H. Williams, USMC. The Paramarines were well trained, aggressive—and outnumbered. Four minutes of naval shelling and ten minutes of dive-bombing strikes did little to even the odds. The Japanese allowed the first wave to come ashore unmolested in order to mask any residual supporting fires, then cut loose with everything they had. Marines fell along the sandy beaches, in the surf, in their boats. Major Williams went down with a bullet through his lungs; two staff officers died at his side. The Paramarines pressed ahead grimly the rest of the long afternoon, then called for reinforcements.

Mary Craddock Hoffman

Captain Crane’s Baker Company was available, its outpost duty on Haleta Point done. Crane received urgent orders to reembark and hurry over to Gavutu. Arriving during the abrupt tropical sunset, Crane received further orders to assault nearby Tanambogo by boat that evening. Darkness added to the confusion. Crane could muster only five of his eight boatloads of troops, but these he led toward the neighboring island. As the second boat crunched ashore on Tanambogo, the supporting destroyer proved too helpful, detonating a fuel dump with its prep fires. The conflagration illuminated the entire miniature landing force. Japanese machine gunners scythed down the Marines as they tried to scramble ashore, then ripped their lethal streams the length of the crowded boats, hitting Marines and Navy crewmen alike. Crane and his NCOs somehow restored order out of chaos, set up a base of fire, then evacuated the wounded aboard the shot-up boats. Five hours later, he and his exhausted survivors made it back to the Marine lines on Gavutu. Failure of the night landing brought a sober conclusion to all who participated: the amphibians still had much to learn about assaulting fortified Japanese positions from the sea.

The battle for Gavutu-Tanambogo thus became the first significant opposed landing experienced by American amphibious forces in the Pacific War. Many historians tend to dismiss this early action as an amateurish, backwater skirmish. Indeed, daylight the next day brought rapid tactical success to the invaders. A reinforcing infantry battalion, supported by a destroyer lying barely five hundred yards offshore, landed on Gavutu at midmorning. Two rifle companies and a pair of light tanks then assaulted Tanambogo. A day’s hard fighting served to root out the cave defenders on both islands. The 1,300 assault Marines suffered 157 casualties in the two-day battles. Against the greater air-sea-land drama of the nearby Guadalcanal campaign, this action appears inconsequential.

Yet the Gavutu-Tanambogo landings represented a microcosm of the opposed landings to come in the Central Pacific. All the promise and frustration peculiar to forcible seaborne assaults appeared to some degree in this crude little preview—including the excruciatingly difficult task of conducting a ship-to-shore assault against a determined foe.

American armed forces brought two unique and interactive forms of naval warfare to fruition in the later years of the Pacific War: the employment of fast carrier task forces and the execution of long-range, amphibious assaults against fierce opposition. While there were many amphibious landings throughout the Pacific, only a few qualify as storm landings—the Japanese description of America’s bold, frontal, daylight assaults into the teeth of prepared defenses.

An amphibious landing per se is an assault launched from the sea by naval and landing forces against a hostile shore. Storm landings in the Pacific War were those amphibious landings distinguished by six additional characteristics. They were all dangerous, long-range, large-scale, self-sustaining assaults executed against defended positions while within the protective umbrella of fast carrier task forces.

For a variety of geostrategic reasons, these storm landings occurred in the Central Pacific from November 1943 to the spring of 1945. The list is short: Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa (where the Japanese 32d Army simply transplaced their beachfront defenses a mile inland), and, by projection, Kyūshū. For the United States, each assault demonstrated a growing mastery of the concentration of overwhelming naval force against a strategic objective and literally kicking down the front door.

Ominously, as American amphibious power became manifest over time, so did the lethality and intensity of the Japanese defenses. These two converging developments were on an exponential collision course in the massive amphibious assaults on southern Kyūshū planned for November 1945. My principal focus therefore covers that twenty-four-month period, roughly from D-Day in the Gilberts to the planned D-Day for Operation Olympic in Kyūshū.

My deliberate focus on this short list of opposed seaborne assaults comes at the expense of hundreds of other landings in the Pacific. I bypass these operations intentionally but with full respect for every web-footed trooper of any service who ever splashed ashore on any godforsaken beach throughout the theater. Each landing had its own story of drama and risk. None were easy. Even Kiska and Morotai cost the landing forces casualties. In part, this universal costliness reflected the tenacity of Japanese defenders, who even when they opted to forgo coverage of a certain beach always seemed to leave behind a die-hard sniper or a series of ingenious booby traps. Many more casualties stemmed from the very nature of amphibious operations—hazardous work with heavy equipment in one of the most unforgiving environments on earth, the surf zone, that jagged seam between land and sea . . . the particular province of the assault amphibians.

The storm landings of the final two years of the Pacific War illustrate both the extreme potential and the great risk of large-scale amphibious assaults. There was nothing of the subtlety of Chinese military theorist Sun Tsu in these landings. The days of combining a tactical defensive with the strategic offensive ended with Guadalcanal and Bougainville. These later operations in the Central Pacific were assaults from start to finish. The landing force never relinquished the offensive. The battles were violent, relatively short, thoroughly decisive, always bloody.

The ability to undertake this most complex and perilous of military operations—the opposed amphibious assault—was the great unknown as the Pacific War opened. The United States fortunately had the rudiments of joint doctrine in place, but many senior officers doubted it would ever work against a well-armed opponent. The doctrine ultimately proved valid, prompting British military historian J.F.C. Fuller to acclaim the development of American amphibious power projection as the most far-reaching tactical innovation of the war.

But such abstract considerations pale beside the sheer human drama of those precarious, go-for-broke storm landings that cut the heart out of Japanese dreams of preserving an empire in the Pacific Ocean—three-dimensional battles of a magnitude and ferocity that may never again be seen in this world.

The first opposed landings at Gavutu-Tanambogo therefore deserve special mention. In the Florida Islands in 1942 the amphibians forced their way ashore against the equivalent of an enemy battalion. Thirty-two months later, and thirty-five hundred miles to the northwest, Adm. Kelly Turner would order his landing force ashore at Okinawa against a reinforced field army—and prevail. The differences in scale between Baker Company’s hasty assault on Tanambogo and the U.S. Tenth Army’s complex invasion of Okinawa were enormous, yet the central components hardly varied. The Americans learned from the Gavutu-Tanambogo experience the valuable dichotomy that while amphibious assaults require painstaking planning, the plan serves nothing more than to bring forces in contact with the enemy close to the objective. Thereafter, success or failure devolves quickly under heavy fire and great stress to the improvisational skills of a handful of junior officers and NCOs.

The early amphibious assaults in the Solomons also taught the Americans there would be no easy road to Tokyo. Yet the mere fact that the United States could launch a division-level amphibious offensive in its avowed secondary theater eight months to the day after Pearl Harbor was remarkable in its own right. In the process, and at a cost, the amphibians learned valuable lessons. Maj. Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift, USMC, commanding the 1st Marine Division in the Guadalcanal campaign, appraised the Gavutu-Tanambogo experience in these terms: The combat assumed the nature of a storming operation from the outset, a soldier’s battle, unremitting and relentless, to be decided only by the extermination of one or the other of the adversaries engaged. These words also proved an apt prediction of the storm landings to follow.

The experiences of Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 2d Marines, at Tanambogo had therefore contributed to the scant body of practical knowledge of waging amphibious war against defended Japanese islands. Night landings would unduly exacerbate the inherent problems of amphibious operations. So would hasty landings executed without decent intelligence or sufficient coordination of supporting arms. Chaos could be expected to rule any opposed beachhead.

Fifteen months later Baker Company would be the first outfit to fight its way across embattled Betio Island in Tarawa Atoll.

* I use the World War II version of the military phonetic alphabet throughout (i.e., Able, Baker, etc., vice the current Alfa, Bravo, etc.).

Chapter One

Cracking a Tough Nut

To effect such a landing under the sea and shore conditions obtaining and in the face of enemy resistance requires careful training and preparation.... It is not enough that the troops be skilled infantry men and jungle men or artillery men of high morale; they must be skilled water men and jungle men who know it can be done—Marines with Marine training.

Maj. Earl H. Ellis, USMC

Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia,

1921

Whatever one’s opinion of Pete Ellis as a self-styled espionage agent, the man was indisputably a prophet of naval warfare in the Pacific in the early interwar years. Ellis was among the first to examine the strategic and operational consequences of a future war with Japan. Ellis saw that America’s Pacific naval bases—Pearl Harbor, Guam, Midway, Wake, the Philippines—were few and vulnerable. By contrast, Japan benefited immensely when the League of Nations mandated to them the former German island colonies in the Marianas, Palaus, Carolines, and Marshalls. Ellis clearly envisioned the island hopping strategy necessary for American forces to wrest control of these advance naval bases from the Japanese. More significantly, the maverick Marine officer knew each island base would have to be seized forcibly, which to him dictated a clear requirement for specially trained and equipped amphibious forces able to fight their way ashore.

Ellis was little more than a voice crying in the wilderness in those early years. The U.S. military in the 1920s was singularly ill-prepared to conduct an amphibious campaign of the nature and scope envisioned by Ellis. At best, the nation could claim the existence of a series of lightly armed, poorly trained landing parties—mixed, provisional forces of soldiers or Marines and bluejackets in motor whaleboats—good perhaps for expeditionary service in troubled harbors, but hardly a force capable of storming a fortified beachhead. Nor was there much inclination to develop such a capability. Too expensive, too complicated, increasingly too risky.

Yet the art of projecting a landing force ashore against hostile opposition was no twentieth-century newcomer to military science. As early as 55 B.C., British cavalry and spearmen attacked Julius Caesar’s VII and X Roman legions as they waded ashore, ten thousand strong, from their transports near present-day Kent. Likewise, French cannoneers and cavalry provided a hot greeting to Gen. Sir Ralph Abercromby’s British invaders as they struggled through the surf at Aboukir Bay, Egypt, in 1801. Momentarily at least the issue was in doubt for both landing forces, but Caesar and Abercromby eventually prevailed, securing beachheads and penetrating the interior. Military and naval commanders historically viewed disembarking in the face of enemy opposition as a dangerous but achievable mission.

This viewpoint changed sharply as the Industrial Age arrived. In the