Colonel Kiuchi Ogata commanded the 50th Infantry Regiment on Tinian, an island the Japanese high command had effectively left to its own devices. After Saipan fell on July 9, 1944, no reinforcements, supplies, or orders could reach his roughly 9,000 men. Ogata faced a limestone island with cliffs rising over 100 feet in places and only three viable landing points: Sunharon Harbor on the southwest coast, Asiga Bay on the northeast, and two narrow gaps in the rock near Ushi Point. Writing to Tokyo on June 25, Ogata judged the enemy landing would come at Tinian Harbor or Asiga Bay.
His defense plan issued three days later named exactly two contingencies: one for Tinian Harbor, one for Asiga Bay. The northwest slots appeared nowhere in the document. He positioned his troops accordingly, placing a single company and one anti-tank gun squad near the northwest beaches, while massing his mobile artillery to cover the two southern approaches instead of the central position where guns could have commanded the entire coastline. His preparations were textbook for the period, despite the subsequent narrative that he blundered.
Tinian’s defenses were also hampered by a breakdown between the army and navy. Captain Oya commanded the naval guard force, but the two services refused to coordinate, with a surviving operational order from each side scrupulously avoiding naming the other. Oya never told his men he was under Ogata’s command. American planners had extraordinary intelligence on Tinian.
They had photographed it from every angle and translated captured documents for weeks, making them nearly as familiar with Ogata’s arrangements as he was. Their knowledge pointed to the same conclusion as Ogata’s: the northwestern beaches were his weakest point. That intelligence did not settle the argument inside the American command. Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner vetoed the plan for landing on the northern white beaches, which he considered impossible, and ordered a landing at Tinian Town instead.
His staff secretly continued working on the white-beach plan. Two nights of reconnaissance by Marines and underwater demolition teams found the northwestern beaches usable, though barely. Under Turner’s order, they left mines undisturbed to avoid signaling an intention. After the swimmers returned, Turner remained intractable.
Admiral Hill went over his head to Admiral Spruance, who called a conference aboard the flagship where every subordinate commander spoke for the white beaches. Turner then announced he favored them too. Six years later, he claimed he had decided to accept them all along unless the reports were badly negative. On the morning of July 24, the deception operation began.
Seven transports carrying the 2nd and 8th Marines lay off Tinian Town with a battleship, cruiser, and four destroyers. Marines descended cargo nets into landing craft, then climbed back aboard, while 22 empty boats ran toward the beach under naval gunfire, turned, then ran in a second time to within 400 yards of the sand. Not one man in the boats was hit. The ships were not so lucky.
A battery of Japanese 6-inch naval guns, hidden in caves behind Sunharon Harbor, had stayed silent for seven weeks, waiting for a target worth firing at. At about 7:40 in the morning, the battleship Colorado lay 3,200 yards offshore. The battery put 22 shells into her in 15 minutes, killing 43 men including 10 Marines. The destroyer Norman Scott covered the battleship and took six more shells, killing 19 men, including her captain, Commander Seymour Owens.
American guns then found the position and destroyed it. Sixty-two Americans died that morning at a landing that was never going to happen. Ogata signaled Tokyo that he had repelled more than 100 landing barges. He was not lying.
He had been shelled and approached by 100 small craft twice, and the craft had turned away. Every observable fact supported his message, and it froze his third battalion around the town. Eight miles north, the real landing had already begun. At about 7:20 in the morning, 24 amphibious tractors carried the first wave across a line of departure 3,000 yards out.
The assault on the two narrow gaps was met with scattered rifle and machine gun fire. American forces kept feeding men through the slots all day in column, rather than in line abreast. By dark, they had put 15,600 men ashore with artillery, half-tracks, and 63 tanks, at a cost of 15 dead and 225 wounded. Both Ogata and Turner had been right: a 60-yard gap in a cliff was a terrible place to land a division.
What Ogata lacked was not judgment. No manual on either side contained the number of men and machines the United States could push through a narrow gap in a single day. Turner guessed low and was argued out of it. Ogata guessed low and had nobody to argue with, because the officer who might have challenged him was the naval captain who would not even name the army in his paperwork.
That night, Japanese units came at the beachhead in three columns without waiting for orders, following Ogata’s standing instruction to destroy the enemy on the beaches with one blow. Marines had strung barbed wire from foxhole to foxhole, rolling the coils out flat to avoid drawing fire. The artillery did most of the killing. By daybreak, more than a thousand Japanese dead lay in front of the lines.
Two things cannot be settled from the record. The first is whether Ogata actually sent the message claiming to have repelled more than 100 barges. The Marine Corps operational history states he did, but an earlier monograph on the battle, written by an officer who went through the captured documents, makes no mention of it and says whether the demonstration caused the Japanese to redeploy is unknown. The second is the colonel’s fate.
On the night of August 2, his last position was overrun. Five Japanese prisoners said he was among the dead, and one lance corporal claimed he saw the body on the wire. The Marines never identified it. There is no grave, only five men who said so.
Tinian was declared secure on August 1, nine days after the landing. The 4th Marine Division lost 212 dead and the 2nd Division 105. Japanese dead counted and buried came to 5,000, with an unknown number sealed in caves. The mop-up ran until January 1 and killed a further 542 Japanese.
Construction battalions began building an airfield before the fighting stopped, moving enough coral to fill three times the volume of Boulder Dam. The first heavy bombers flew against the Japanese home islands from Tinian three months after the island fell. Over the following year, 29,000 sorties flew out of the Marianas.
One of them, on August 6, 1945, took off from the runway at the north end of Tinian and flew 1,500 miles to Hiroshima.