Personal Histories of World War II in the Marianas

This series is presented by the CNMI Museum of History and Culture for the 60th Anniversary Commemoration of the Battles for Saipan and Tinian.

A SHEPHERD’S STORY

“The bullets zipping into the water looked like raindrops hitting a puddle,” recalled 79-year-old Mike Lucero of Montrose, Colorado about the bloody invasion of Saipan. “They were striking on both sides of my boat.” As dawn broke on June 15, 1944, Coxswain Third Class Lucero maneuvered his landing craft vehicle/personnel (LCVP) along the side of the towering steel hull of the USS Livingston. On deck, above the rope netting that laddered down the side of the huge transport carrier, men of the 2nd Marine Division were finishing off their breakfast of scrambled eggs and ham. They had a big day ahead of them. They were about to change the course of history.

Saipan was the northernmost of the southern four islands in the Marianas, 15 volcanic rock mountains that had mushroomed from the ocean floor eons ago to edge the east Philippine Sea. They were 3,200 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor, 1,500 miles from Manila, and strategically controlled the Pacific. Over 29,000 Japanese troops jealously guarded the narrow beaches on the west coast where a coral reef split to allow access to Saipan’s harbors of Garapan to the north and Chalan Kanoa to the south.

The entire island was six miles wide and 14 miles long. Prior to June 15, the islands had two seasons—a wet summer season and, when the winds turned in August and came from the southeast, it became dry. In 1944, the winds of war added a new season, a season of blood.

Lucero steadied his high-sided Higgins boat as 36 Marines climbed down the rope netting and began to quietly fill his landing craft. They looked soberly at the chaos on the distant shore where clouds of gray dust rose from the bombings and strafing runs of the Navy planes trying to dislodge the enemy. The battle-hardened veterans of Guadalcanal and Tarawa didn’t give the shelling much credence. The Navy’s big guns and air force had supposedly “softened up” Tarawa for three days prior to that invasion, but 3,000 Marines still died taking that bloody beach. The grisly truth was some of them were going to die today, and they knew it.

“We had to go in fast,” Lucero said, describing his dangerous assignment of delivering men to the beach. “We were the second wave.”

On the shore looking out to sea, Japanese Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the executioner of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, must have thought he was seeing a gray ghost. Among the 209 ships off Saipan were the USS California and the USS Tennessee. He had left the two destroyers for dead at Pearl Harbor and now, like an unforgivable sin that returns in the amber years of one’s life, the mighty battle wagons haunted the coast of his island fortress.

“They gave us the order to land over a loudspeaker and we headed for the shore.” Lucero grew a little distant as his soft brown eyes seemed to suddenly see the nightmare of the invasion all over again. “There were bodies floating in the water.”

Lucero was a stranger to violence. On December 1, 1942, at the age of 19, he had been called from the peaceful hills and arroyos outside of Cuba, New Mexico, to war’s brutal front door. Somehow, Washington, DC, 1,709 miles away by crow from Cuba, had culled Lucero’s name. The hard but tranquil life of tending his father’s sheep would abruptly change. The good, earthy smell of greasewood and sage after a winter’s rain was replaced with the sharp odor of spent nitrate, and the constant beckoning of the lambs had eroded into terrifying screams. Still, the gentle man with the quiet voice headed his Higgins boat into hell. “It was my job,” Lucero explained. “They trained me to run the LCVP.”

“Andrew Higgins,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower once stated, “is the man who won the war for us. If Higgins had not designed and built those LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach.” The rugged Higgins boat had busted the gridlock in ship-to-shore operations. A coxswain, an engineer, and two deck hands crewed the vital link. The “head log,” a solid block of wood at the bow, was the strongest part of the 36-foot ocean taxi. The boat could carry over 8,000 pounds and drafted only 18 inches of water. Higgins would manufacture 20,000 units during the war, and all but a handful found work running men and supplies from huge ships to the dangerous shores.

A competent coxswain could run his launch up a beach, drop its 7-foot ramp, unload 36 men, rev the 225-horsepower diesel engine, and back off the sand into the sea in a matter of minutes. And minutes were all they had, as LCVPs were the preferred targets of Japanese heavy artillery. Lucero’s launches delivered 8,000 fighting Marines on Saipan’s beach in less than an hour. It was the beginning of one of the bloodiest fights in the Pacific. It was also one of the most bizarre.

“The island people started jumping off the cliffs into the sea,” Lucero said, shaking his head sadly. “They were that afraid of us.” The Imperial Palace had been indoctrinating the inhabitants of Saipan since 1934 when it boldly claimed the Marianas as a territory. The people had been told that the Americans were evil monsters. Over 8,000 people jumped like lemmings off the cliffs near Mount Marpi into the shark-infested waters rather than risk capture.

The importance of the Marianas manifested itself when the Japanese fleet began steaming to the defense of Saipan. The Marines and the 27th Army Infantry on the beach were temporarily abandoned by most of the American Fleet as it raced off to meet the Japanese in what would be called the great “Marianas Turkey Shoot.” American flyers engaged and destroyed over 726 of Japan’s planes in the battle of the Philippine Sea. The naval victory sounded the death knell for Saipan and ultimately Japan.

High up on Mount Tapotchau the war had come full circle for Vice Admiral Nagumo. The battle-gray ghosts of Pearl Harbor had returned with a haunting vengeance. Almost 29,000 Japanese troops had been slain in the struggle to hold Saipan from the giant that Nagumo’s Imperial Fleet had awakened on December 7, 1941. Vice Admiral Nagumo took his own life on July 6, 1944.

The mighty Japanese Empire had been defeated by a gentle kid from Cuba, New Mexico, and thousands upon thousands of men like him. They were all strangers to war, but they had the raw courage to do their hazardous jobs in a savage contest that they in reality knew little about. Lucero was there because, as he simply but eloquently puts it, “My country needed me. I had to go.”

In October 1945, Lucero returned to the quiet hills and arroyos outside of Cuba, New Mexico carrying a Good Conduct Medal and the Asiatic Pacific Medal with one bronze star for his valiant role in taking Saipan, where 3,426 Americans had died. His medals are not showcased in his home. They are tucked away in a drawer and mostly forgotten. Lucero is not a soldier’s soldier. He is a man of peace. However, somewhere behind those soft brown eyes that peer unassumingly out at the world lingers the nightmare of a time when a gentle shepherd, 1,709 miles as the crow flies from Washington, stepped forward because his country needed him.

(“War changed life of peaceful shepherd,” The Montrose [Colorado] Daily Press, April 29, 2004. © The Montrose Daily Press. Reprinted by permission.)