World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: Return of the Flag

A radioman at Pearl Harbor adjusted his earphones, tapped out “Go ahead.” The first message came in: “This news is from Radio Guam. Nothing heard from you since 1941. Greetings.”

Thus last week the liberated area of Guam signalized its return to U.S. possession. Two days later. Major General Roy S. Geiger, commanding the Amphibious III Corps, added formality to fact by running up the Stars & Stripes at his headquarters on the island 3,800 miles west of Pearl Harbor, proclaiming U.S. military government in effect.

The Japs had made plenty of mistakes in planning the defense of Guam. The Marine 3rd Division, advancing southwest from the northern beachhead, found elaborate mine fields and gun positions off the former U.S. Naval Station at Piti. Casualties would have been heavy if the marines had landed there. Instead, they smartly flanked these and many other defenses. But the enemy was still no setup. He was fighting the same kind of savage rear-guard action he had fought on Saipan, where 21,036 Jap corpses had been buried, where 3,414 Americans were dead or missing.

English Spoken. “This is an inconceivable, heartrending task,” radioed TIME Correspondent Robert Martin from Guam. “By day, the marines fight ceaselessly against small groups of hardy Japs holding dug-in positions. The Japs are well armed and well supplied, and the terrain is on their side. Offsetting these are our superior artillery, our unopposed air power.

“Even at night there is no rest. Infiltrating Japs simulate Americans bringing supplies to the front. They try to get by the sentries with such phrases as: ‘Make way, we’re passing through.’ Their English is pretty good, but our sentries are rarely fooled.”

Marines’ Homecoming. By week’s end the peninsula battle was finished. Orote airfield, the Sumay base of Pan American Airways and pre-Pearl Harbor Marine Barracks were in U.S. hands. Crack fighters of the ist Marine Provisional Brigade (veterans of Edson’s ist Raider Battalion, Carlson’s 2nd and Liversedge’s 3rd) had still to clean out snipers in the jungle around the airfield.

Behind them, Seabees and Army engineers repaired the roads. Before them lay Apra harbor, its turquoise waters whipped into white streaks by PT-boats on guard against enemy movement. U.S. ships returned to the harbor—the first since the minesweeper Penguin was sunk Dec. 8, 1941. Supplies began to flow in for the attack inland. Patrols probed seven miles across the island. Main bodies followed, cut Guam in half.

Tanks on Tinian. North of Guam, 125 miles, lay another U.S.-Jap battlefield: 48-square-mile Tinian, only three miles from Saipan. On its comparatively level ground, the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions deployed more tanks than had yet been seen on a Pacific island.

They quickly captured the elaborate Ushi air base—a major staging point in the Japs’ steppingstone route to the south —and rolled on to take a second strip near Gurguan, also Tinian town. Casualty figures were vastly more favorable to U.S. forces than in any comparable island operation. Only 15 marines were lost in the landings; within a few hours, 1,200 Japs had died.