BATTLE NARRATIVE
Glad Simply To Be Alive Tinian: Occupation and Departure
Charlie Company buddies on Tinian, August 1944:
Sandy Ball, Wilson Cook, Charles Czerweic, Michael Murray, Giuseppe Giambone
The struggle for the strong point was the battalion’s last significant fight of Operation Forager. Shortly after noon on August 3, RCT-24 received orders to relocate to an assembly area several miles north “to await relief and evacuation.” A composite force, made up of one unlucky company from each battalion, stayed in the southern sector with “the mission of final mopping-up and the burial of our own and enemy dead.”[1] This outfit was attached to RCT-23, already busy with patrols and POWs. Reports from these patrols gave grim echoes of the mass suicides at Saipan’s Marpi Point: adults throwing children from cliffs and jumping after them, last stands in caves, or futile rushes at American guns. Japanese military personnel were observed actively murdering civilians. In one horrific incident, soldiers tied forty people together and set off a satchel charge in their midst. Bodies flew thirty feet in the air and fifty feet from the epicenter; the soldiers returned and shot the survivors, sparing only a few small children.[2] Language officers and captured civilians used mobile PA systems to broadcast appeals to surrender, giving a deadline of 0900 on August 4. Hundreds complied, but not all: when the deadline passed, RCT-23 unleashed “an intensive barrage” against the last hiding places, then moved methodically through the area with grenades and flamethrowers.
“The clean-up job, as usual, proved to be a tedious, costly business,” noted the RCT-24 diary. “During this period, the 24th Marines suffered a total of 179 casualties, of whom nine were killed in action.”[3] Nineteen-year-old PFC William D. Rowland (C Co), a former Clemson University student from Alpine, Texas, was shot in the chest and killed on August 5, 1944. He would be the battalion’s last casualty in the Marianas.
With combat operations concluded, the replacements attached from the Second Marine Division were released from their temporary assignment. A total of 162 of these men served with the First Battalion on Saipan and Tinian; six were killed in action, while 28 suffered wounds of varying severity. The majority were reassigned to regiments of the Second Marine Division, and spent the rest of the war patrolling for Japanese stragglers on Saipan. A handful of the wounded would return to the battalion when they recovered, becoming permanent members of the unit.
The original contingents gathered together for “gung-ho” photographs. Fifty-two from Able Company and 69 from Baker stood in front of a clump of trees, showing off flags, rifles, and swords captured in the recent campaigns. Many shrugged off shirts; their ribs are visible, arms surprisingly thin. They sport fresh white bandages on hands, across chests, or patching holes in shoulders. Those old enough to grow beards have them; younger men look childlike by comparison. Some muster up brave smiles, while others glare straight through the photographer. Able Company landed 231 Marines on June 15, 1944; Baker had 224. Charlie Company was on mop-up detail at the time and may not have had a picture taken, but if they did it would depict just over 100 of an original 226. Having lost so much in six weeks of hell, the survivors can hardly be blamed for projecting hostility in their portraits.
Survivors of Able and Baker Companies gather for "gung-ho" pictures, 5 August 1944.
(There is no known similar photograph of Charlie Company)
First Lieutenant Roy I. Wood, Jr., was taking a well-earned rest in the bivouac area when an older man in Navy uniform approached. Lieutenant James Hazen Hardy introduced himself and inquired about 1Lt. Philip E. Wood, Jr., who had fallen in action on Saipan. “Phil’s mother and my wife are sisters,” explained Hardy. “I thought that if there was any word about Phil that I could pass on to his mother, she would appreciate it.” After a long pause, Roy Wood told all he knew.
Roy Wood went on, describing how Phil’s wedding fell apart at the last moment and how he was meant to be the best man, how the patrol on July 5 played out, and how, in his opinion, Phil deserved the Navy Cross. He invited Hardy to ride up to camp and introduced Irving Schechter, Fred Stott, and Wilbur Plitt. Hardy learned how “Big Harry” Reynolds, still hospitalized from his Saipan wounds, “suffered a nervous breakdown when he heard of Phil’s death – the shock must have been severe.” Several enlisted Marines offered their condolences and memories. “I know they spoke from the heart when they said they missed him,” Hardy related. “All his men were very fond of him; ‘he was a swell guy.’ He performed his job well and bravely. He was loved by his superiors and subordinates. He was a man’s man. What more can a fellow accomplish in his life if he lives 23 years or 73 years?”[4]
On August 8, 1944, the First Battalion broke camp and marched to a beach where a series of LSTs waited on the sand. The landing ships brought them to the USAT Sea Corporal, an 8,000-ton transport which had just unloaded part of Tinian’s new garrison force. Moderate swells bucked and rolled the ships; LST-40 and Sea Corporal knocked together and suffered damage, but this barely registered on the men in the holds. When she weighed anchor, Sea Corporal carried the 24th Marines’ First and Second Battalions, plus regimental headquarters and several companies of support troops. Colonel Franklin Hart had a memorable voyage – he was informed of his pending promotion to brigadier general – but few of his men cared. “Our trip back to good old Maui must have been uneventful,” recalled PFC John C. Pope, “because I do not recall anything unusual.”[5]
The long voyage ended on August 24, 1944. Sea Corporal put in at Kahului, and the Marines wearily walked down the gangplanks to the same docks they left from in May. Lines of trucks waited nearby to ferry them back to Camp Maui. The camp had changed very little: “same tents, same auxiliary buildings, and the same old ‘heads’” – but it was now beloved. “With nearly two months of bloody campaigning through the heat and cold and rain and war-filth of Saipan and Tinian, the return to Maui was like coming home,” noted the regiment’s war diary. “Hardly a man was not overjoyed to return to that which he had first regarded with deep misgivings. Hardly a man was not glad today, simply to be alive.”[6] Pharmacist’s Mate Walter Dodd was almost euphoric. “Boy does this fresh clean air smell & feel good,” he wrote. “Showers of fresh water – seems like living again. Many times I wasn’t sure I’d ever see it again. I find my clothes are all too large for me, even my tailored Marine Greens. The boys here in the rear echelon look so pale and very clean. Perhaps we will be like that soon. You know, already that the operation is beginning to seem distant.”[7]
The distance was not so great that men could ignore the sad silence in their quarters. “In many tents of the 24th Marines, there were empty cots where a few months before had lain living, laughing buddies,” noted the war diary. “In some companies, whole tents were empty, their former occupants now buried on Saipan or Tinian or at sea.”[8]
Sergeant Mike Mervosh returned to Camp Maui shaking off the effects of dengue fever and the memories of buddies lost in the Marianas: “Top” Lilja, “Saint” Santilli, Dawson Brewer, and many more. He had suffered extreme thirst, dysentery, small shrapnel wounds, bad chow, sleepless nights, and the horrible sights of mass civilian suicides. He had killed people in every way imaginable, and some that were incredible – like the Japanese soldier he blinded with tobacco spit, then stabbed in a nighttime knife fight for a foxhole.[9] Some Marines called him “combat crazy,” but as Mervosh surveyed the survivors of his section in August 1944, he had a better term in mind: combat oriented. “By that time, we were really combat veterans,” he said. “Man – after Tinian, we could whip their butts when we land on Japan. That’s the way I felt.”[10]
- Division Report (Tinian), 281.
- V Amphibious Corps, “Tinian,” 296.
- 24th Marines War Diary (April-September 1944), entry dated 2-6 August 1944.
- James H. Hardy, letter to Isabell Rapp Hardy, August 1944.
- Pope, chap. 20.
- 24th Marines War Diary (April-September 1944), entry dated 24 August 1944.
- Dodd, 149-150. Letter dated 25 August 1944.
- 24th Marines War Diary (April-September 1944), entry dated 24 August 1944.
- Stoner, 50-51.
- Mervosh, 2008 interview.
