Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  The attack finally slowed and then expired around eight o’clock in the evening, about a thousand yards south of Tanapag. Over four thousand Japanese had been killed. There weren’t enough left alive to continue. The Americans suffered over a thousand dead and wounded but quickly recovered the ground they lost. There were Japanese survivors hiding in caves who were still capable of putting up some resistance. Presumably they planned to die defending the last few miles of Saipan. Many of them would, as would many civilians, convinced that the American barbarians would roast and eat their children if they were taken alive.

  Gabaldon tried to save as many lives, American and Japanese, as he could. He reported taking over a hundred prisoners two days before the gyokusai charge. He had spent the previous night behind enemy lines, where he remained for the duration of the attack, hiding near the cliffs at Marpi Point at the northern end of the island. He watched wounded Japanese coming back from the attack throw themselves into the sea. He watched others disappear into the caves in the cliffs, along with thousands of civilians.

  On the morning of July 8 he took two prisoners on the head of what would thereafter be known as Suicide Cliff. He pointed to the armada standing offshore and said it would soon train all its big guns on the caves. They would surely be killed, he told them. Why die when they had a chance “to surrender under honorable conditions”? He convinced one of them to carry his appeal to his fellow gyokusai survivors at the bottom of the cliff. Later he wrote that while he waited for their answer, he wondered who the real prisoner was. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of Japanese there, who had but hours ago been trying to kill every American they could, at the cost of their own lives. They could take his life in a flash if they wanted it. He was still pondering his predicament when the Japanese soldier returned with twelve others, all carrying rifles.

  Gabaldon didn’t know if they were giving up or if he was now their prisoner. They didn’t point their weapons at him, but they didn’t lay them down either, and he wasn’t in a position to order them to do so. This time he couldn’t convince anyone that there were a hundred marines hiding somewhere on the open expanse of the cliff top. “Dozo o suwari nasai” (Please sit down), he invited them and offered them cigarettes. He told them he was his shogun’s emissary. “General Smith admires your valor and has ordered our troops to offer safe haven to all the survivors of your intrepid Gyokusai attack yesterday. . . . You will be taken to Hawaii where you will be kept together in honorable quarters until the end of the war. The General’s word is honorable.”

  Their commanding officer, a first lieutenant, reached for one of Gabaldon’s cigarettes and asked if his wounded would receive treatment in a hospital. Gabaldon assured him they would. The officer gazed at the American fleet for a moment, then turned to Gabaldon and announced, “So da yo! Horyo ni naru!” (So be it. I become your prisoner.) With that, he stood up, and leaving four of his soldiers with Gabaldon, went to summon the others from the caves. He returned with fifty more soldiers. Gabaldon was still apprehensive. “They do not look like defeated men,” he reported. “They are proud and serious—as if they haven’t really made up their minds.” The Japanese officer informed him there were many more wounded below, soldiers and civilians, and they needed urgent treatment. He insisted the worst wounded be given medicine and water immediately. Gabaldon explained that he hadn’t enough of either commodity to meet their needs, but all would be provided once they reached American lines. He asked the lieutenant to bring up all his people. Some minutes later a seemingly endless train of soldiers and civilians, hundreds of them, some grievously wounded, emerged from their caves and began working their way up the cliff.

  When they reached the top they expected to find a large party of Americans. Instead all they saw was one small Chicano kid from East L.A. in a white T-shirt, wearing aviator sunglasses, a baseball cap with the brim turned up, and a pistol in a shoulder harness busily separating soldiers, civilians, and wounded into separate groups and silently wondering how the hell he was going to get all these prisoners to the rear by himself. It wasn’t long before his prisoners became restive, but then they spotted a group of puzzled marines on a nearby hill staring at them. Gabaldon had one of the Japanese wave his skivvies on a stick. The marines hopped in a jeep and drove to them, while another group came running. Soon afterward the party of marines brought in the first of Gabaldon’s prisoners to the command post. Eight hundred more followed. They brought the last bunch in at ten o’clock that night, after which Gabaldon ate a K ration and went to bed.

  He awoke the next morning to excited congratulations from his lieutenant. Hurley told him he had heard Captain Schwabe was going to recommend him for a Medal of Honor. Gabaldon replied he’d believe it when he saw it, and then he and Hurley headed back to the cliffs to see if they could convince any more to surrender.

  While many of the surviving Japanese were resigned to surrendering, and some even desperate to, there were others still intent on killing and dying. Many marines had approached caves and bunkers and tried to coax them out; they were killed for their compassion. More often grenades and flamethrowers were used to settle the question, or bulldozers closed up entrances and left the inhabitants to die a slow death. Japanese who wouldn’t surrender broke the fuse on their grenades and clutched them to their chest. Others simply swam out to sea until they could swim no farther, while some marines took potshots at them for sport. Many jumped from Suicide Cliff onto the rocks below, where they died slowly and painfully. To the horror of the Americans, many of the suicides were civilians, entire families of civilians, hundreds of them.

  The Americans tried to save some of them, and did. Others couldn’t be persuaded. Gabaldon recalled one mother running toward the cliff with an infant in her arms. He pleaded with her not to jump and asked permission to shoot her in the legs, which an officer refused to grant, and then watched as she threw first her child and then herself over the edge. While the suicides were occurring, General Smith declared Saipan officially “secured.” Many hardened veterans of the Pacific were haunted by their memory of Suicide Cliff more than any other experience in the war.

  TWO WEEKS LATER GABALDON landed with the rest of the division on Tinian. He claimed he was officially credited with taking 183 prisoners there, “a record in itself,” he wrote, “but to me anti-climactic.” The Battle of Tinian lasted a week and claimed two thousand American casualties, a seventh of the fourteen thousand dead and wounded on Saipan. Gabaldon was back on Saipan in August, helping mop up isolated bands of diehard Japanese still hiding in the mountains and jungles. He heard more rumors that he would receive the Medal of Honor, and his superiors assured him he was going to be promoted. Not long after returning to Saipan, he was caught in an ambush and wounded in his wrist and side by machine-gun fire. Just before he left Saipan, he was awarded the Silver Star and was clearly disappointed it wasn’t a Medal of Honor, as were, he claims, his immediate superiors. Then someone stole his war souvenirs.

  He lived a colorful and peripatetic life after the war. He went back to school, married and divorced, and ran a seafood and bush-flying business in Mexico, where he met his second wife, Ohana, whose father was Japanese. He claimed he recruited a battalion of volunteers to fight Castro in 1961 but was stopped by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who denounced him as a vigilante. He tried to lead a group of freedom fighters in Nicaragua, he said. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in 1964. He had five sons and three daughters.

  In 1957 he was surprised to find himself the subject of an episode of the television show This Is Your Life. Captain Schwabe was there, along with two others of his officers, to testify to his courage, enterprise, and humanity. Hurley appeared on the show too; so did Lane and Lyle Nakano, whom he hadn’t seen in years. He was overjoyed to be reunited with them. Three years later Paramount Studios released Hell to Eternity, a film based on his exploits on Saipan. In the movie Gabaldon became an Italian surname, and blue-eyed, six-foot-two Jeffrey Hunter played him.
Gabaldon served as a technical advisor on the film and appeared to have enjoyed the experience. But he wanted it known that, unlike in the movie, where his character often has a sidekick on his missions, in reality he was always alone.

  After the movie his Silver Star was upgraded to a Navy Cross, the second highest decoration a marine can receive. That was nice, but he still felt shortchanged. He believed he had earned a Medal of Honor, and so did his immediate superiors. He had captured over fifteen hundred Japanese and killed thirty-three by himself, and you didn’t have to take his word for it, he insisted, his officers would vouch for the numbers. He believed only racism could explain why he did not receive the decoration he deserved. In his later years he said he felt happy and blessed. But you could tell it still bothered him.

  In 1980 he moved with his family to Saipan, where he owned a couple of small businesses, worked with the police for a time, and ran a program to keep kids off drugs. He resented the influence Japan had on the island, which he attributed to organized criminal networks. He resented too that the memorial on Saipan for Japanese war dead was more impressive than any tribute to the Americans who sacrificed so much there, and he campaigned for a memorial that would do justice to their memory.

  He went home to California in 1995 and eventually retired to Florida to be near some of his children. He died there in 2006. He never received the Medal of Honor. There are many who feel that is an injustice; others feel differently. His Navy Cross citation commends his “extreme courage and initiative” on Saipan. No one would argue with that. Perhaps the best summary of Gabaldon’s actions on Saipan is the one that the lone wolf from East L.A. himself gave to an interviewer not long before he died: “I fought my war the way I wanted to, when I wanted to and where I wanted to.”

  No one could argue with that either.

  Sergeant First Class Chester D. “Pete” Salter Jr. upon his return from Korea in 1951.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Duty

  Chester “Pete” Salter fought hand to hand to get off a hill in Korea, and was wounded fighting to take the hill back and retrieve the body of the man who had saved his life.

  MOST OF THEM WERE INEXPERIENCED, poorly trained, ill-equipped, and fresh from the comforts of occupation duty in Japan. But green or not, every soldier in the 19th Infantry Regiment would have known he had walked into a disaster as soon as he reached the Eighth Army’s front lines on the southern bank of the Kum River.

  On July 12, 1950, the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea comprised the 24th Infantry Division, which, at that time, consisted of just three understrength regiments: the 21st, the 34th, and the 19th. The bloodied remnants of the decimated 21st passed through the 19th’s ranks to take up a blocking position in the rear. The whipped and demoralized 34th held the line to the left of the 19th. On the other side of the river were two of North Korea’s best divisions, and they had armor, the feared Soviet T-34s, which couldn’t be stopped by any weapons the thin American line then possessed.

  There wasn’t much fighting that first day. The 19th didn’t lose a man to hostile fire as it took its place on the right of the line. But one soldier, Corporal John Carlyle Smith from Lowell, North Carolina, twenty-seven years old, died from a heart attack. In a few days hundreds of names would appear with his on the 19th Infantry’s casualty list.

  The Eighth Army was deployed to Korea piecemeal. Given the speed with which the three invading columns of the North Korean People’s Army, the Choson Inmin’gun, had overwhelmed the unprepared, outnumbered, and less armed forces of the Republic of Korea, this was hardly ideal. It was, however, a necessity. On June 26, when President Harry S. Truman authorized General Douglas MacArthur to send American troops to Korea, the 24th Division, like the other three divisions occupying Japan, was understrength and scattered around the home islands of Japan. It would take time to consolidate, reinforce, and organize its transport to Pusan. MacArthur directed the division’s commanding general, Major General William Dean, to send a small force at once to Pusan with orders to deploy as far north as possible and delay for as long as possible the North Korean advance. A Guadalcanal veteran, Lieutenant Colonel Charles B. “Brad” Smith, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the 21st Infantry Regiment, got the call.

  Task Force Smith consisted of two reinforced but still understrength rifle companies, a heavy weapons platoon, and a number of headquarters and communication personnel, about five hundred soldiers in all, each equipped with 120 rounds of ammunition and two days’ worth of C rations. About a third of the officers had combat experience, as did about half of the noncommissioned officers. In the ranks, though, very few had fought in World War II, maybe less than a sixth, typical in the postwar army. They left for Pusan by airlift the morning of July 1 with a parting instruction from MacArthur, the general of the army and supreme commander of the newly authorized United Nations Command, to confront the advancing enemy “with an arrogant show of force.” The following night the first elements of the 34th Infantry Regiment left for Pusan by ship, and the night after that the rest of the 21st Infantry deployed. Both regiments had two rather than the regulation three battalions, and their mobility, firepower, and training were far from combat-ready due to massive postwar defense budget cuts.

  From Pusan the task force traveled by train to the city of Taejon, where Smith conferred with Brigadier General John Church, who had arrived in South Korea several days earlier with a party of officers from MacArthur’s headquarters to assess the situation. He told Smith to take his force to a place several miles north of Osan, near the town of Sowan on the Osan-Seoul Highway, to support South Korean troops that had been driven from the capital and were in danger of annihilation. Smith would have a single field artillery battery to support his mission.

  On July 5, in the Battle of Osan, Task Force Smith managed to hold up a North Korean column for several hours before being enveloped and decimated. That was a commendable achievement considering they were seriously outnumbered and had no way of stopping the T-34s. About 40 percent of the task force was killed, wounded, or missing. The rest worked their way down to the 34th’s lines fifteen miles to the south or scattered into the hills.

  Two days later the 34th, having fallen back prematurely from its initial positions, set up a new defensive line in the town of Chonon, which also quickly collapsed. Most of the regiment bugged out in a disorderly retreat south. Many of the wounded were executed by North Koreans, and many others shot while trying to surrender. The regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Robert Smith, was killed while trying to stop a T-34 with a 2.36-inch bazooka.

  On July 10 Colonel Dick Stephens tried to hold a ridge about twenty miles northeast of Taejon with the 3rd Battalion, 21st Regiment, and what was left of Brad Smith’s 1st Battalion task force. General Dean asked Stephens to delay the North Koreans for four days, while he set up his defensive line along the bend of the Kum River above Taejon. Stephens could give him only two days before two North Korean divisions enveloped his lines. Many of his men fought valiantly and well under the circumstances, and their retreat to the river was orderly. Since the Battle of Osan, the 21st had lost over half its soldiers. Including support personnel, the regiment had about eleven hundred men still able-bodied, but they looked anything but combat-effective as they slogged past the newly arrived 19th Regiment.

  Major General Walton “Johnny” Walker, veteran of both world wars and a corps commander in Patton’s Third Army, arrived in Pusan on July 13 to assume command of the Eighth Army, which still amounted to not much more than the three understrength regiments of the 24th Division that were manning the thin line along the Kum River. Walker established his headquarters at Taegu, just east of the Naktong River. He had wanted to be closer to the front, at Taejon, the important transportation hub where Dean and the 24th’s HQ were presently located. But Taejon was a confused, chaotic place, overcrowded with refugees pouring south in front of the Inmin’gun columns, and communications were hard to maintain there.

  More to the po
int, the city was certain to fall, as Walker and Dean both realized. When was the critical question. Walker pressed Dean to hold off the North Koreans as long as he could to give him enough time to set up a defensive perimeter along the Naktong that could hold while the Eighth Army built up strength. Taejon was snug behind a wide bend of the Kum that served as a moat around three sides of the city. To hold the city you had to hold the river, so Dean ordered all the bridges blown after the last, weary soldiers of the 21st Infantry crossed to the south bank on July 12, and the 19th Regiment, untested and no doubt a little scared, took its place in the line.

  The 19th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed “the Rock of Chickamauga” for its famous stand in that bloody Civil War battle, had started arriving in Pusan on July 4. Most of the regiment had been stationed in Japan. They had had no time in country to train or prepare before they were rushed to the front. The regiment had brought twenty-two hundred men in total to Korea, including headquarters staff and communications and support personnel. As the only regiment in the division that hadn’t been chewed up already, the 19th was expected to hold the longest stretch of the river, nearly thirty critical miles, with 3rd Battalion, 34th Infantry holding the left flank. So long a front with so few troops to defend it necessitated wide gaps in the line. The 19th’s commanding officer, Colonel Guy Meloy, put his 1st Battalion and two rifle companies in the 2nd Battalion, E and G, on the line. He held the rest of the 2nd in reserve. He had six artillery batteries supporting him.