9 Days After D-Day, U.S. Mounted Massive Assault on Saipan in Pacific : World War II: A little over a year later, a B-29 took off from the Mariana Islands with the name “Enola Gay” on its nose. Destination, Hiroshima.

From 1907 onward, Japan had plans for an eventual war with the United States.

The essential component never varied: The American Navy would be lured across the Pacific, sniped at as it came. When it reached Japan’s home waters, it would be annihilated in a climactic battle.

In June, 1944, the stage was set. The United States was about to invade Saipan in the Mariana Islands, 1,268 miles southeast of Tokyo. Japan gathered its warships.

The fleet the Japanese would annihilate bore only a dim relationship to the one they had crippled at Pearl Harbor or even the one that won the crucial Battle of Midway seven months later. It was an awesome machine of fast carriers and battleships by the dozens that hadn’t even existed when the war began.

As a measure of America’s industrial and military might, both Saipan and Normandy were to be invaded within nine days of each other in the biggest operations in their theaters half a world apart.

Since November, 1943, with the bloody conquest of Tarawa, the combined forces of Adm. Chester W. Nimitz had island-hopped across the Central Pacific, each invasion point within range of land-based air support from the last and bypassing Japanese strongholds.

The campaign had its critics, particularly Gen. Douglas MacArthur, whose Army troops were fighting along the New Guinea coast toward the Philippines. That archipelago, where MacArthur’s former command had been beaten into surrender in the high tide of Japanese aggression in 1942, represented a moral, political and strategic must to him. It was also, he argued, the easiest and most logical path to victory over Japan.

Nimitz’s thrust, with Marines also fighting up through the Solomon Islands, only diluted the U.S. effort. Nimitz’s rebuttal, with the influential and outspoken backing of Navy Commander-in-Chief Adm. Ernest J. King, was that the most direct route was to stride across the Pacific directly to Japan. The Marianas would put Japan within bombing range of the new Boeing B-29 Superfortresses.

Critics say Nimitz’s drive added to the war’s cost in lives and effort. Its supporters claim that it kept Japan off balance, their military having to guess, often incorrectly, where the Americans would strike next. One had only to look at a map, however, to see that the Marianas would be Nimitz’s next move.

Nimitz, in fact, had initially opposed the idea. The Marianas had poor harbors and were in reach of enemy planes from the Philippines. King insisted. The Marianas were as essential as unsinkable aircraft carriers.

Lt. Gen. Yoshitsugu Saito had 29,662 soldiers and 6,100 marines to defend the 25-mile-long Saipan, shaped something like a rhinoceros on end. For several days U.S. warships led by 15 battleships had bombarded the shore defenses. From the shore Adm. Chuichi Nagumo recognized at least four of them as battlewagons his carriers had sunk at Pearl Harbor, since refloated.

On June 15, 1944, about 8,000 Marines of the 2nd and 4th Divisions landed under heavy resistance, scrambling over coral reefs to establish a 1-by-4-mile beachhead. By the end of the day, 20,000 troops were on shore.

Seaman James Fahey aboard the cruiser Montpelier noted the paradox that between bombardments his shipmates sunned or fished over the side “while on the beach men were killing each other.”

The next day the Army’s 27th Division landed with reinforcements. The combined force relentlessly penned the Japanese into the north end of the island.

The final phase for the Decisive Battle, A-Go (Operation A), was completed by the Japanese that April. According to the Japanese plan, the U.S. fleet would be decoyed within air range of the Philippines, then, teaming with the carrier force under Vice Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa, the Japanese planes would send it to the bottom. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo assured the navy that the Saipan invaders would suffer a similar fate.

The U.S. fleet was commanded by Adm. Raymond A. Spruance, the victor at Midway and a smart, judicious sailor with both a tendency to seasickness and reasoned tactics. His strike arm, Task Force 58, contained 15 carriers and seven fast battleships under Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher. His flattops outnumbered Ozawa’s 2 to 1 but each side had just under 1,000 aircraft, half of Ozawa’s on land.

As was too often the case, the Japanese A-Go was overly intricate, requiring a finesse of coordination over vast expanses of ocean with less than perfect communications. The Americans were less dogmatic.

Japanese scout planes spotted “an unknown number of carriers” June 18 west of Saipan. Rear Adm. Sueo Obayashi immediately launched an attack from his three carriers. Ozawa ordered the planes back to be ready for a bigger battle next morning.

Mitscher had also discovered the enemy and wanted to give chase. Spruance, whose primary mission was to protect the invasion, overruled him.

The next morning Ozawa sent his carrier planes aloft. As they departed, the U.S. submarine Albacore fired two torpedoes at the brand-new carrier Taiho. A Japanese pilot exploded one by diving his plane on it. The other hit the “unsinkable” Taiho on her starboard side.

Damage was controllable, but to clear fumes of leaking gasoline, a damage control officer turned on exhaust fans. They blew the fumes throughout the ship, turning it into a floating bomb.

Meanwhile, Navy Hellcats, Grumman fighters specifically designed to outperform the enemy Zero, fell upon Ozawa’s planes like falcons. Within a few hours--in what became known as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot--they downed 346 planes, losing only 15 of their own.

The skipper of a second submarine, Cavalla, raised his periscope. There was a carrier with a Rising Sun “big as hell!” said Cmdr. Herman J. Kessler. Sneaking to within 1,000 yards, he hit Shokaku, one of Nagumo’s Pearl Harbor carriers, with three torpedoes. She slowly turned turtle and sank. Half an hour later Taiho exploded “like Mt. Fuji.”

Ozawa decided to withdraw to regroup. As daylight faded, Mitscher, with Spruance’s approval, decided to attack even though the enemy was at extreme range. The planes found Ozawa at dusk and sank the carrier Hiyo and damaged two others and a battleship.

Twenty U.S. planes were lost in the attack and more began ditching on the flight home as they ran out of fuel.

“So long,” a pilot radioed.

“I’m lost,” signaled another.

Throwing prudence overboard, Mitscher ordered all lights on to guide the returnees. The dark sea became “a Hollywood premiere, Christmas in New York and the Fourth of July all in one.” Eighty planes had ditched, but 49 fliers were rescued.

A-Go cost the Japanese 476 aircraft plus the three carriers. More important, because the Japanese did not follow the American process of withdrawing veteran pilots to train the next generation, their lost airmen were replaced by inexperienced recruits.

On Saipan itself, the ground commander, Gen. Holland M. (Howlin’ Mad) Smith, a Marine, ignited a mini-war when he relieved the head of the 27th Division for lackluster performance. The Army was in an uproar, reflecting interservice rivalries that continually dogged the war in the Pacific.

Smith, “the only Marine who could outshout an admiral,” bit his lip until it bled as Army brass called his Leathernecks “just a bunch of beach runners.” Marines countered that the Army was overcautious and incompetent and barked when they encountered passing GI “dogfaces.”

The firestorm was interrupted by a Japanese banzai charge on July 7. Officers with ancient samurai swords, the wounded hobbling on crutches, soldiers with rifles or only bamboo spears, came charging out of the night from their caves “like a movie cattle stampede.” Marines had to drag bodies aside to keep open fields of fire. Four thousand of the enemy died. Worse was to come.

Believing the propaganda that the Americans were butchers and rapists, civilians began leaping from cliffs into the sea in mass suicide. One family tossed a grenade back and forth like a beanbag until it exploded. A woman giving birth jumped to her death. Mothers with crying babies sheltered in caves strangled them on orders from Japanese soldiers lest they give away their positions. A man who hesitated at the cliff’s edge was shot by a Japanese soldier who was riddled in turn by the Americans. Whole families waded hand-in-hand into the surf.

In all, about 22,000 Saipanese killed themselves. Only 2,000 of the garrison survived. Obedient aides shot Nagumo and Saito in the back of the head: There was no time for the more ritual sepuku.

In Tokyo, Tojo’s wife began receiving calls asking if her husband had killed himself yet. Instead, he resigned on July 18.

Three days later the Marines and GIs of the 77th Division invaded Guam, the U.S. possession overrun by the Japanese early in the war. One enemy banzai charge fueled by sake was a drunken failure. A sober one almost pushed Marines of the 3rd Division into the sea.

Organized resistance on the island 150 miles from Saipan ended Aug. 10, but the last enemy soldier, Cpl. Shoichi Yokoi, didn’t surrender until 1972, his rifle still serviceable but its wooden stock rotted away.

On July 24, the day before the U.S. Army broke out of the Normandy beachhead, two Marine divisions landed on Tinian, a smaller island within sight of Saipan. It was a textbook operation.

Adm. Richmond Kelly (Terrible) Turner, the Navy’s landing expert, said he wouldn’t put Marines on the beach Smith had selected. “Oh, yes, you will!” Howlin’ Mad stormed. “You’ll land any goddamn place I tell you!”

Smith feinted toward one beach and landed on another, quickly outmaneuvering Tinian’s 10,000-man garrison, of which only 250 survived. Within days Navy Seabees began turning Tinian’s flatlands into the largest air field in the world.

The Marianas had cost the Americans 24,009 casualties. But the naval action had reduced Japan’s hope for a climactic battle to the dim hope of a deathbed gamble.

The new Tarmac runways on Saipan and Tinian could launch a B-29 every 14 seconds, which would soon make a mockery of Japan’s boast that its home islands were immune from attack.

A year and a week after Tinian had been secured, a fugitive Japanese soldier named Kizo Imai, who had been hiding in the jungle awaiting a rescue that never came, peered through the leaves at an unusual sight. A sole B-29 illuminated by floodlights in the darkness was surrounded by photographers snapping the plane and its crew. Imai wondered what was going on.

The bomber’s nose bore the name “Enola Gay” for the pilot’s mother. It was bound for Hiroshima and the dawn of a new and dangerous day.