As American forces closed in on Guam in the summer of 1944, Japanese headquarters on the island sent daily radio reports to Tokyo for as long as they had a working set and a man to key it. In the final days, those reports went out from two concrete bunkers built in a bamboo-covered hollow at the foot of Madaguac Hill, deep in the forest of the island’s northern plateau. The bamboo was the reason for choosing the spot. Carrier aircraft had been over the island since late April, and warships settled offshore in July.
In the 13 days before the landing, naval guns fired nearly 29,000 rounds into the western shore, including 836 shells from 16-inch guns. On the morning of the landing itself, another 9,000 rockets went in. The figures come from American gunfire reports that no one on the island ever saw. Civilians eventually told the Americans where the hollow was.
Patrols that went near it drew heavy fire from hidden positions. On August 11, soldiers of the 306th Infantry went in behind tanks and a mortar barrage. They threw white phosphorus grenades, pushed pole charges forward, and set off more than 400 blocks of TNT against the fronts of the bunkers until the openings collapsed. Three days later, Army engineers dug the bunkers out again and found 60 Japanese dead inside.
One of them was Lieutenant General Hideoshi Obata, commander of the 31st Army and the senior Japanese officer on Guam. How the general died is a question the American histories all take up, and they do not give the same answer. By then, the Americans had been collecting Japanese documents for three weeks. Papers came out of dugouts, packs, and the pockets of the dead, and anything useful went up the chain to Admiral Nimitz’s headquarters, where it was translated, given an item number, and filed.
Prisoners went to interrogators who wrote up each conversation as a numbered report. After the war, when the Marine Corps and the Army sat down to write the official histories of Guam, they went through that material and quoted the garrison’s own notebooks at length. One diary belonged to a second lieutenant named Kanamitsu Kurakawa. His entry for April 30, 1944, said nothing unusual happened until noon, when a formation of about 30 planes strafed and bombed the airfield for the rest of the afternoon.
A month later, with no Japanese planes anywhere in the sky over Guam, he wrote that he now understood why the newspapers at home kept pleading for more production, for even one more plane at the front. In the third week of June, the lesson came down on the airfield itself. While the Japanese carrier fleet far to the west threw its strike at the American fleet and sent survivors to Guam to refuel and rearm, American planes circled overhead and bombed the field from morning to evening. At dusk, Japanese carrier bombers arrived over a strip that had just been wrecked, with no fuel and no ammunition left.
Fifteen or sixteen of them came down onto the broken field at Oro and crashed there. The diarist wrote that he could not watch it without weeping. The words about the tragedy of war, he said, had never been so real to him. Prisoners told interrogators the same story from the other end.
One man captured on Guam explained that he and his comrades had pinned their hopes on a night counterattack until star shells came over one after another. A night attack under that light meant throwing men forward as human bullets. He said he had been horrified by how many of his own side the naval guns killed every single day. The division’s operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Haidayuki Tada, made the same point in drier terms after the war, writing to the Marine Corps historians.
Japanese air strength against the American kind had been as nothing in quantity, he said. His men survived it by hiding in every fold of the ground. What it cost them was daylight. Nothing could move by day, so reserves arrived late, and every counterattack launched at the right moment arrived at the wrong one and failed.
July was the month the garrison worked out, from the shells themselves, where the landing would come. An artillery officer plotted where the all-day bombing and shelling was falling and settled on Gone Point. A private in the 10th Independent Mixed Regiment wrote on July 11 that the main enemy force would probably come ashore between Agana and PT. Both men were right.
The American bombardment was pointing at the beaches it meant to take, and the division pulled battalions in from the south and east to meet it, moving mostly by night because by day the shells found everything on the roads. An engineer squad leader put the whole month into one line: on this island, no matter where one goes, the shells follow. The positions were not ready. A lieutenant named Immanishi wrote that the works were almost finished but nothing like what anyone had hoped, that the overhead cover still was not done, and that the unit was in real trouble.
Most of the digging had to happen after dark by men who had spent the day under bombardment. On July 15, Major General Shagamatsu, commanding the Aana sector, signed an order declaring that when the enemy landed, the garrison would crush him at the water’s edge and completely destroy the landing force on the beaches. An officer noted in his diary that his one relief from the bombardment was a strong drink. A corporal named Suzuki wrote that he and his comrades had shortened their expectancy of 70 years of life to 25.
When the historians asked what the bombardment had broken, the answer came back like a demolition inventory. Any direct hit flattened a building strengthened in a hurry, and any field position that took a shell was gone. The shelling knocked down more than half of everything the garrison had put up along the landing beaches, much of it sand that offered little resistance. Concrete half a meter thick held unless a shell struck its corner.
Permanent concrete more than a meter thick came through every direct hit without a crack. Every naval gun standing in the open went before the landing. About half of those set back in caves still worked on the day, and they fell silent soon after they opened fire when the shelling brought their cave mouths down. One shell found the water pipes.
The harbor works came through almost untouched, as did the communications installations, which sat in dead ground where shells from the sea could not reach them. The daily reports to Tokyo kept going out until organized resistance ended, and Tokyo paid attention. A captured file of 31st Army messages later showed the Americans what the high command took from them. The battle studies the Japanese high command sent out afterwards told commanders to put troops, guns, supplies, and communications underground and to build defenses in depth.
At Eoima and Okinawa, Japanese commanders ordered their men not to spend everything in a single charge. After the landing, the diaries lost their sense of distance. One officer wrote that American aircraft searched the forest for his units all through the daylight hours and bombed and strafed even a single soldier. At night, the warships lay off every side of the island, shelling to cut Japanese communications, and he said it hampered everything his headquarters tried to do.
The great counterattack of the 25th broke down on the heights above Assan, and Shigamatsu died in that fighting. General Takasha, the division commander, was cut down by machine gun fire on the 28th, and Obata took direct control of what was left. The division fell back north toward Mount Santa Rosa. On the way, it marked the anniversary of its founding.
One of its officers wrote that he was deeply moved, that the surroundings could not have been more different from a year before, and that there had been just a little sake for the men to drink one another’s health. The shelling was dreadful, he added, and a corporal named Nakaji, already hurt, had taken his own life. Few of these writers can ever have stood inside an American factory. Their notebooks are full of what the factories made.
By the morning of August 11, Obata knew his headquarters had been found. The signal set in the bunkers at Madaguac sent one more message, addressed to the emperor. The garrison was still fighting a desperate battle, he said, but they had only their bare hands to fight with. Holding Guam had become hopeless.
Their spirits would defend the island to the very end. He was overwhelmed with sorrow for the families of his officers and men, and he prayed for the prosperity of the empire. What happened to the man who sent it is the point where the files split. The Marine Corps monograph of 1954 says under his photograph that men of the 306th Infantry killed him when they overran the command post.
The Army’s official history gives a death on the 11th and nothing more. The Marine Corps commemorative history written in the 1990s has him taking his own life or falling to the attackers sometime in those last hours, and it will not choose. The National Register paperwork for the site, drawn up in 1975, puts his body among the 60. That is all.
None of them can do better. For a plain physical reason, the assault blew the opening shut while the fight was still going on, and when the engineers dug back in three days later, there was nobody left alive in there to ask. The histories agree on the date, the hollow, and the count of 60, and on nothing past that. In the jungle, the writing went on for another year, and it came down to food.
Patrols were killing or capturing about 80 Japanese a day in the weeks after the island was declared secure. One soldier wrote that he was surrounded by nothing but enemies and that it took a brave man to go out looking for something to eat. The American papers were not all triumph either. On August 9, acting on a report of two or three thousand Japanese hiding along the northern cliffs, a single battalion of long-range guns put a thousand rounds into the forest in two and a half hours, and the division batteries added more than 2,000 more.
The Marines who walked in afterwards found no resistance and very few bodies. The core artillery staff officer later wrote that the intelligence had been wrong and the whole effort wasted, and allowed that it had at least given the campaign a loud finish. The interrogation files kept correcting the Americans, too. By mid-August, the attackers had claimed 59 Japanese tanks destroyed or captured on Guam.
A notebook taken from a Japanese staff officer on Saipan listed 38 on the island at the end of May, and Captain Hideos Sato, who had commanded the 24th Tank Company, gave his captors a lower figure than that. His interview is filed as Third Marine Division prisoner interrogation report number 396, dated October 7, 1944. The Army historian concluded there were never more than 38 tanks on Guam, possibly fewer. The Marine historian put the gap down to several units claiming the same kill and damaged tanks being reported as destroyed.
The surviving papers do not settle how many were real or which unit got which. The psychological warfare unit of the island command spent the following year talking in the survivors. In a different area, a major came in from the south on June 11, 1945, with 34 men. One surrendering party was photographed walking in beside an animal the caption calls their mascot.
Tada later described how he in the north and Sato in the south tried to gather the leaderless survivors for guerrilla war, and how the loss of men and weapons, the lack of food, and what he called skillful psychological warfare delivered them gradually to their captors. Their objective failed, he wrote. Tada came out himself on September 4, 1945, two days after the surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay. He had kept what he called a division command post in the jungle about a mile and a half southwest of Taru, near the northern tip of the island, for more than a year.
After the emperor’s rescript, he sent emissaries to the island commander, General Larson, then led in 67 officers and men, and a week later ordered in 46 more. With those 46, the last organized body of the Guam garrison was in American hands. The island he came out onto had held at the end of that August more than 220,000 people, and about one in ten of them were Guamanians. The rest were soldiers, sailors, and marines, with the navy the largest share.
A naval base filled Apra Harbor. Navy aircraft crowded the fields at Aana and on the Orote Peninsula, where the carrier bombers had crashed with empty tanks. The June before, Admiral Nimitz’s forward headquarters stood on the heights above Aana. Up on the northern plateau, in the same forest that had hidden Tada’s men, four airmen had started drawing runways in a tent in November, working around Japanese stragglers in the brush.
The engineers behind them moved more than a million cubic yards of earth. The first B-29 landed on North Field in February, and by early summer, its bombers were flying against Japan every day. For most of that year, Tada’s command post had sat within a few miles of those runways. Tada’s own verdict, set down for the American historians, was that after what he had watched come from the sea and the air, it was no longer possible to defend an island properly with isolated ground troops.
Everything he watched had been built on the far side of the Pacific and shipped to him. It arrived in quantities. His diarists could describe it the way men describe weather, and in no other way. They had watched it arrive for nearly three months before the landing.
By the end of August 1945, American counts showed 18,377 Japanese dead on Guam and 1,250 prisoners. Patrols had killed or captured more than four in ten of them after General Geiger declared the island secure. By August 10, 1944, a little over 2,000 Americans had died in action or of their injuries. Sixty of the Japanese dead lay in one hollow at the foot of Madaguac Hill.
Corporal Suzuki’s diary has an item number. Lieutenant Kurakawa has one, too. Neither history says what became of either man.