In the dark hours of June 17, 1944, 44 Japanese tanks rolled toward the American beachhead on Saipan in what would become the largest tank attack Japan launched anywhere in the Pacific. The Marines of the Sixth Regiment heard them before they saw them: a squeak and rattle of steel tracks that carried over the shellfire all the way back to the regimental command post. The Japanese army had learned the measure of American armor more than two years earlier. On December 22, 1941, north of Damortis on Luzon, light tanks of the Japanese Fourth Tank Regiment met a platoon of five new M3 Stuart tanks in the first tank battle the United States fought in World War II.
The lead Stuart, commanded by Second Lieutenant Ben Morren of Maywood, Illinois, swung off the road, took a direct hit, and caught fire. The other four tanks were all hit as well. The fighting ran down the Bataan Peninsula until the last tank duel on April 7, 1942. Two days later, the tank battalions on Bataan surrendered with everything else.
Japan came out of that campaign owning American tanks, prepared and driven under its own flag. The army shipped the first improved Type 97 medium tanks, called Shinhoto, to the Philippines with a new long 47 mm gun and tested it against a captured Stuart. At 1,000 meters, it penetrated the armor with three hits out of six. At 800 meters, it was six out of nine.
The older guns had struggled against the front of an M3, and the new gun did not. The men who won those early fights never reached Saipan. The Fourth Tank Regiment went on to Java and Sumatra and spent the rest of the war in the Dutch East Indies. The Seventh, which had sent tanks ashore on Corregidor, was never sent to the Marianas.
The unit that landed on Saipan in the spring of 1944 was the Ninth Tank Regiment, which had spent 1942 on the Soviet border in northern Manchuria. What it brought from Luzon was the lesson itself. Most of the tanks it took into the night attack were Shinhoto mediums carrying that same 47 mm gun. The Ninth’s commander was Colonel Tadashi Goto, who had taken over in December 1941, the same month Ben Morren’s platoon was hit.
On Saipan, he had three companies, half of a fourth, and his headquarters tanks. Of about 990 men on the island, the first and second companies and the other half of the sixth were down on Guam. What sent his tanks forward that night was an operation order from Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito, commanding the 43rd Division. The Marine Corps historian who later worked through a translation of it gave a verdict that is hard to improve on: a masterpiece of confusion.
Goto’s outfit was not a jungle unit. It had been formed in August 1939 at Teing in Manchuria, drawing men from the Third and Fifth Tank Regiments. In the same summer, the Third was fighting Soviet armor at Nomonhan. It trained for open ground and for Soviet tanks.
In January 1942, a young volunteer named Shiro Shimoda, who had asked to serve in tanks, began his first training with the Sixth Tank Regiment at Aono in Hyogo Prefecture. In April, he was posted to the Ninth at Dong Ning near the Soviet frontier. He became a corporal and a radio operator. He is one of the few reasons anything is known about the regiment’s last night from the inside.
Saito’s order set the objective as the Saipan radio station, a building about 400 yards behind the lines of the Sixth Marines, with the beach another 500 or 600 yards beyond it. The infantry of Colonel Ogawa’s 136th Regiment were to attack first. The tanks were to advance after the infantry had started, then charge the radio station just before the infantry broke in. A naval landing force was to come down the coast road and join in.
Its instructions said the attack would be made whenever possible. Saito wanted all of this to begin at 5 in the afternoon. Sunset that day was at 6:49, full darkness a little after 8, and by 5:00 most of the Sixth Marines were already well dug in. Moving the tanks up to their start line took far longer than anyone had planned, and the attack did not reach the Marines until about 3 the next morning.
It was a kind of order written a long way from the ground it described. There had already been one warning. At about noon on the day of the landing, four Japanese light tanks had come at the Sixth Marines with no infantry beside them. An armored amphibian mounting cannon knocked out three of the four.
The Fourth Company of the Ninth had fought on the beaches that first day and came out of it with three running tanks out of 14. How many tanks went forward on the second night is harder to say than it should be. Hoffman’s history counts them company by company: 14 from the Third, 14 from the Fifth, seven from the Sixth, six from headquarters, and those three survivors of the Fourth. That is 44.
Shimoda, who was there, remembered it differently: two companies of 24 plus five headquarters tanks under Colonel Goto, 29 in all. The Marines in the foxholes had no count at all. Hoffman wrote that nobody on the American side had reason to expect more than a dozen. Shimoda also left the one account of an argument before the start.
By his telling, Goto asked to take his remaining tanks in as an independent thrust, and the division’s chief of staff, Colonel Takaji Suzuki, told him the tanks would move with the foot soldiers and attack together. The ground forced the column into twos, and the tanks went forward in groups of four or five with soldiers riding on the engine decks, heading for a radio station about 2 kilometers away. The Marines were waiting for them, and so was something else. When Captain C.
G. Roland of Baker Company, First Battalion, Sixth Marines, heard engines on the slope in front of him at about 3, he called the battalion command post, and one of the things he asked for was more light. The naval gunfire team was told to keep that sector lit all night, and destroyers offshore began firing 5-inch star shells over the approach, one after another: parachute flares that hung above the fields and turned the whole valley white. Every tank coming out of the dark was lit from above, and every tank that caught fire lit the next one behind it.
Colonel Suzuki, the same staff officer who had kept the tanks with the infantry, later described the problem for his own army: the Americans pointed out targets with star shells which practically turned night into day, and moving units became extremely difficult. Major James Donovan, the battalion’s executive officer, watched the first wave come into Baker Company’s sector at about 3:45. Many of the Japanese tanks were running with their hatches open, the commander standing up out of the turret to direct the driver, and some were being guided by a crewman walking in front on foot. Infantry clung to the handrails around the turrets.
As the Marines’ machine guns found them, the soldiers following on foot tried to climb aboard too. The guides and the commanders standing in the hatches were hit one after another, and the tanks lost what little control they had. Baker’s bazooka teams were right in the main line for that night beside the riflemen. Another team came across from Able Company to help.
Two 37 mm guns covered the road into the center of the position. One of them jammed, and its crew stayed put and fought with their bazooka and anti-tank grenades instead. On the flank, a machine gun of Fox Company, Second Marines, fired 40 belts, 10,000 rounds, before it was done. Behind them, the pack howitzers of the First Battalion, Tenth Marines, had a defensive fire plan registered on exactly the ground the tanks were crossing.
Between 3 and 4, they put 800 rounds into it without needing to adjust. Two privates first class, Charles Merritt and Herbert Hodges, went out into the open with a rocket launcher, dodging left and right between shots, and were credited with seven tanks for seven rockets. Both received the Navy Cross. Sergeant Alex Smith, a machine gun squad leader, watched his bullets bounce off the armor, left his gun, and used the grenade launcher on his carbine to stop three tanks in quick succession.
The Japanese tanks began to wander. Some drove in circles, some ran into the marshy low ground and stuck there, and some broke through the foxhole line and kept rolling toward the beach with no one left in the hatches to guide them. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Jones, later described one Marine who let a tank pass over his hole, jumped out, and jammed a coconut log into its road wheels. The tank spun, and when its commander opened the hatch to look, the Marine dropped a thermite grenade inside.
It cost Baker its captain. A near miss knocked Roland out of the fight, and Jones sent Captain Norman Thomas, the commander of his headquarters company, forward to take over. Thomas had won a Silver Star on Tarawa doing exactly the same thing, taking over from Roland in the middle of a fight. On Saipan, moving forward to do it again, he was killed by fire from a Japanese tank.
The star shells had a price of their own. The Marines and the fleet had never fired them in such numbers. Saipan ran short, and after that first night they were rationed to six an hour except in an emergency. Each empty shell casing weighed about 35 pounds, and they came down inside the Marine lines with a warbling sound that Hoffman’s history says was nearly as frightening as the Japanese artillery.
By 7 in the morning, the field was quiet. Daylight showed somewhere between 24 and 31 Japanese tanks burning or dead in the grass, and the 75 mm halftracks of the regimental weapons company finished off anything still moving. If every claim that night were added together, the Marines had destroyed more than 50 tanks. Observers from the division counted 31 hulls.
The Marine tank commander on the scene said years later that the argument over who got them was never settled. War correspondent Robert Sherrod gave most of the credit to riflemen who waited in their holes until the tank rolled past and then fired into its thinner rear armor. One tank got away and climbed the road to the top of Hill 790. A naval gunfire officer walked 20 salvos onto it, and it smoked there for the rest of the day.
The First Battalion, Sixth Marines, had 78 casualties, and Fox Company of the Second lost 19. General Thomas Watson, commanding the Second Marine Division, walked the ground and said his men had got their number. On the Japanese side, the accounting came two days later. On June 19, Major General K.
G. Aa, chief of staff of the 31st Army, sent his count of what was left on the island. For tanks, he wrote, about two companies remaining. Three companies destroyed.
That same day, General Saito ordered what remained of the tank unit to gather at its maintenance area and prepare to counterattack a landing at Magicienne Bay, a landing the Americans never made. One Japanese tanker who had missed the night attack wrote in his diary that the regiment was down to 12 tanks in total and that if there were none, he would fight with his sword. He gave his age as 24. The account that quotes him does not give his name.
The two companies on Guam lasted until the Americans landed there in July. On Guam, the Japanese lost 29 tanks of the Ninth along with nine more from an independent company to bazookas and Sherman tanks. By the end of the war, 21 men of the regiment were still alive. Shiro Shimoda was one of them, and he later wrote a book about the regiment’s end.
Colonel Goto’s own ending is harder to pin down. American accounts spell his name at least three ways, and at least one has him killed in the night attack of June 17. A battle chronology published in Japan lists him among the dead by the first days of July. His Japanese biography gives his name as Tadashi Goto and his date of death as July 18, 1944, nine days after the Americans declared Saipan secure.
None of them says how that date was fixed. Ben Morren, the lieutenant whose Stuart burned at Damortis, came through the war. After the hit, he had asked his crew what they wanted to do and let them vote. They chose to surrender rather than fight their way out of a burning tank.
He spent almost the whole war as a prisoner. When he finally came home to Maywood, he ran up the front steps and lifted his crying mother off her feet. Less than a year after his liberation, he joined the Jesuits and served as a priest in Arequipa, Peru, for more than 30 years. His own account of Damortis does not quite match the histories.
Morren remembered anti-tank guns firing at his platoon, one of them blowing off the front door of his tank, and then an enemy medium tank ramming him and breaking his track. The histories mostly say light tanks and a single direct hit. Morren died in April 2015 at 94, the last surviving officer of the 192nd Tank Battalion. A photograph of a Stuart flying the rising sun, repaired by the Fourth Tank Regiment and later handed to the Seventh, is often captioned as his own tank.
Nobody has shown whether it is.