Word: saipan
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Palau. The same day that MacArthur struck, and three months to the day after Saipan, Admiral Nimitz' marines attacked, 500 miles due east of Mindanao. Their target: the Palau Archipelago (five principal islands, 100 smaller ones). Palau was the brightest star (and capital) of Japan's vast mandated empire. "The spigot of our oil barrel," the Japs called it, when their ships left port to tap the great oil reserves of the stolen Indies...
More to Come. Complete capture of Palau would give the Navy its best frontline anchorage west of Pearl Harbor-far superior to Guam and Saipan 850 miles to the northeast, and one of several big naval bases needed for operations against the Philippines, Formosa or China...
...Their opposite number-Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who led the Japanese attack, shot himself on Saipan this summer, while the island was being overrun by marines. Nagumo gathered his staff in a hut and they all committed suicide, but not before one of them had set fire to the hut so that their bodies were partially burned...
...eighth day of the Saipan battle the Second and Fourth Marine Divisions had advanced rapidly on each side of the island. Then they had to wait, because two regiments of the 27th Army Division-with battalions faced in three directions, unable even to form a line-were hopelessly bogged down in the center. The third regiment of the 27th meanwhile had failed dismally to clean out a pocket of Japs in the southeast corner of the island...
...ninth day Ralph Smith was relieved (technically, for disobeying an order to attack), and Major General Sanderford Jarman, who had come along as Saipan's postbattle commander, took over the 27th temporarily, fired several officers, including a regimental colonel. Thereafter, the 27th performed fairly well until its greenest regiment broke and let some 3,000 Japs through in a suicide charge which a Marine artillery battalion finally stopped, at great cost to itself...