On July 7, after three weeks of fighting, the worst suicide charge of the Pacific War was about to get underway. Rather than resort to surrender, between three and five thousand screaming Japanese soldiers and sailors broke through a gap in the Army lines.
Nick Grinaldo
I remember it rained like hell that night, and the water was running down the slope into our foxholes. I had to use my helmet to keep bailing out, you know. The night before the banzai, I woke up that morning and, oh, Jesus Christ, they [the Japanese] got above us, and they were giving us plunging fire, shooting right down into the foxholes, because they were high enough to look down. Lt. Gower, he was my platoon leader, he was regular Army….he was a good man. He called us together, the squad leaders. He said, ‘I think we’re getting hit with a banzai. We’re going to have to pull back.’ Holy Jesus, there was howling and screaming! They had naked women, with spears, stark naked! They took bayonets and strapped them on the end of a pole. And they came screaming at us figuring, ‘Hey, the good-hearted Americans ain’t gonna shoot a woman, you know?’ Horseshit. There were so many of them, like cockroaches coming out of the woodwork. We had to pull back.
John Sidur
I saw everything, women and men mixed up, everything, and we just kept shooting. Whoever got too close, that’s who got the bullet… we got to the point that there were too many casualties. So we tried to hold back as much as we could…We were getting mixed up with the Japanese and all of a sudden we got hit with artillery. American artillery, they said it was for the Japanese, but we were on the frontline and we got hit with that. We lost quite a few men—I got hit then, I got shrapnel from artillery on my hand, not too bad.[47]
Nick Grinaldo
I was with the lieutenant and a few of the men that were with me. And all of a sudden I turn around and I see the lieutenant go down. He took one right across here [gestures to his jaw], blew the whole bottom of his jaw right off… I went to grab him, to take him with us. And he said, [shaking his head] ‘Get back to the Japanese trenches!’ There were trenches at the point, that’s where we headed… it was general rout, a general rout. We had them running right alongside of us. I had one running right alongside of me. Christ, he wasn’t five feet from me! I don’t know whether he was ‘sakeed up’ or what the hell was wrong with him, but I put him down quickly, I tell you! They were right with us!
That’s when I got shot through the shoulder. When we fell back to the trenches, my rifle fell out of my hand, and I went to pick it up, I could not close my hand. I looked and I saw a trickle of blood on my right shoulder. We had a guy by the name of Tony Simonds, he was in C Company before he went to a medical detachment. And [now] he was running with us and he turned around and he said, ‘Let me fix your arm, sergeant.’ I said, ‘Not here, Jesus Christ, not here!’ He said, ‘Here, you’re hurt bad!’ He took care of me. While he’s standing in front of me, he took one [a bullet] right in the back which was intended for me—he took it. Nice guy, a real nice guy.
We got to the Jap trenches all right, and all of sudden we started to get hit with artillery fire. Real bad, and it was our own! They had to be [105 mm] howitzers, and they poured them into us, trying to break up the Jap banzai.
27th Division on Saipan assessing results following July 7, 1944 banzai charge. New York State Military Museum.
That’s what they tried, to break up the attack. Unfortunately, we had made it back there and they didn’t know we were there, and they killed [us]—half of the casualties we suffered, was right there.[48]
More than 900 men of the 27th Division’s 105th Regiment would be killed or wounded in this attack. With their backs to the water, the Army survivors could see half of the estimated 4,300 Japanese dead in front of them. [49]
When the Saipan operation was declared secure on July 9th, over 16,500 Americans were casualties, with over 3,400 killed or missing. Approximately 29,000 Japanese defenders had been killed, with almost no prisoners being taken. Some of the enemy survivors would live on in the hills for months and even years afterwards. [50] To compound the horror, over twenty thousand civilians were killed, hundreds of whom committed suicide by wading into the sea or jumping off cliffs, fearful of U.S. soldiers and captivity.
Ralph Leinoff
The native population, the Chamorros, had been under Japanese control for many years, and they were fed a lot of propaganda about how they should not surrender to the Americans, the American troops are barbarians and everything. And rather than surrender—they believed this stuff—and we tried to get women and children down, but the people were so indoctrinated that rather than surrender, they jumped from the cliffs with…with the babes. There are movies—you might’ve seen them, I don’t know—showing people who were trying to get them down and they wouldn’t trust us.
Joe Fiore
The Japanese told these people there that if the Americans grab you, they are going to torture you and kill you, especially Marines, because in order to become a Marine you had to kill either your mother or your father, which was garbage. But those people ‘ate it’, and they jumped, they jumped off that cliff! Terrible!
Joe Fiore would be one of the American casualties in the battle for Saipan.
I was wounded here [points to chin] and took one here [points to lower lip/jaw], and of course, from my ankle to my buttocks, it was full of shrapnel. That hurt! And I didn’t realize how much shrapnel I had in me until they got me off the stretcher, these two hospital corpsmen, and they sat me in these metal chairs. Well, I went right through the ceiling! It was like sitting on a pin cushion... I was in isolation because of my wounds. The most serious one went in here and came out here [points to upper thigh]. It was a piece of shrapnel. So I was in tough shape. For 18 days, I was out of it. I was receiving morphine every 12 hours—at noon and at midnight—and it would wear off at 10 o’clock, right on the dot. And I’d beg the nurse to give me another shot and she said, ‘No way!’
So anyway, I finally got out of there and back to my outfit, and I was back in combat again. And when I left the hospital, I still had a bandage around this leg [points to left thigh].
My mother took it pretty bad when she got the telegram that I was wounded. So my sister and my brother said, ‘Well Ma, at least he’s alive!’ And I felt sorry for her when she got the notice of the second Purple Heart… [He trails off, looks down, and softly begins to cry].[51]
Fiore shortly returned stateside on leave and finished out the war in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Even before the battles had ended at Saipan, Guam, and Tinian, Navy Seabees got to work and the first B–29 bombers arrived.
The Hell of Peleliu
Working his way out of Australia, General MacArthur prepared for his assault on the Philippine Islands. Military planners decided early on that the fortified island of Peleliu stood in the way and would have to be taken. On September 15, 1944, the 1st Marine Division and Army troops began the attack on Peleliu after three days of heavy bombardment by Navy gunships. Peleliu hosted a major Japanese airfield that, in the planning stages, was deemed a major threat to any U. S. advance on the Philippines. The island was heavily defended by over 13,500 Imperial troops dug into a network of pillboxes and 500 coral caverns and caves.
Four young men from the local counties surrounding the “Falls” back home were assigned to the 1st Marine Division and had developed a strong bond even before going overseas. They now found themselves together in the thick of it on Peleliu, and later, would be in the battle for Okinawa. Daniel Lawler was assigned as an ammunition carrier in a squad for a BAR [Browning automatic rifle, a .30–caliber heavy machine gun] to K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment. John W. ‘Jack’ Murray was a squad leader and heavy machine gunner. Harold Chapman joined Jim Butterfield in the 6th Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment.
Dan Lawler was nineteen years old.
Dan Lawler
We hit the island, which was only four miles long by two miles wide. I was in the first assault wave. It was
hell, and everyone was scared—it was an awful feeling. As we disembarked, I looked up and down the beaches, and all you could hear was screaming, and men were falling and dying. There was artillery, mortar, and machine gun fire constantly. We fought all day, and by evening, we reached the airstrip about half mile from the beach. We set up for the night along the sides of the airstrip. The temperature was from 102° at night to 120° in the daytime.
We went in with two canteens of water—that’s a gallon of water. This island was two degrees off the equator! By noontime, we were out of water. They sent more in to us in 40–gallon drums. They brought them up to the lines, and we drew the water out. They used these for gasoline before, and didn’t clean them out—so we almost got sick just drinking water.
John Murray
Luckily, we made it to the far side of the field. My squad was still intact. The first thing I saw was a Japanese machine gunner chained to his machine gun... They were not going to give up.
Dan Lawler
The second day in, I started across the airfield, and machine gun fire and shells were going by us. We were running, and what you do is run a short distance and then you drop, run a short distance and then you drop. You never want to stay running, because you do not want the Japs’ machine guns to get after you. About halfway across, I heard an artillery piece go off. It must have landed behind me, and I went down—face down. When I woke up I was still facing down. I pulled my right hand down, and I looked at it [looks at hand]. It was all bloody, and I couldn’t feel anything in it. So the corpsman came along, and he said, ‘You have four fingers broken.’ And my arm was broken [points to arm]. So he patched that much up and said, ‘You also got hit in the back—you got a wound on your back.’ So he patched that up, tagged me, and then I came out.
Dan Lawler, 2011. Portrait by Robert H. Miller.
Lawler was evacuated to a hospital ship, then to a hospital on Guadalcanal. He was awarded the Purple Heart and rejoined his outfit later on Pavuvu, the ‘rest and recuperation’ area back in the Solomons.[52]
John Murray
Some of our men were getting hit and we were much smaller now. There was no clean water on the island, and our water was brought in old oil drums that hadn’t been properly cleaned. Between the bad water and the extreme heat many of us started to get sick with dysentery and fungus. I believe time on the island under these conditions was starting to take its toll. The 1st and 7th Marines were out of action because of casualties. We, the 5th Marines, had to take Bloody Nose Ridge.
After securing the airstrip, the Marines headed into the coral hills to reduce the Japanese defenders. The fight for Bloody Nose Ridge and the Umurbrogol Mountain was particularly brutal, and considered one of the most difficult fights of the entire war, with the 1st Division losing up to one-third of its strength. Many of the hundreds of limestone caves and former mine shafts were interconnected and had multiple entrances, housing artillery pieces protected by sliding steel doors, machine guns, and thousands of troops. [53]
Jim Butterfield
The first 200 hours at Peleliu, we lost over 1,600 people. That made our regiment the first regiment that could no longer function as a regiment! They split the rest of us up—which was about 500—into other outfits.
John Murray
My memory of what happened was of total destruction and death. Every day was the same. That damned island was all coral rock. Our movement was slow, sometimes only a few yards each day... It’s hazy now but it was very vivid for so long, sleepless nights filled with emptiness, sadness, fear, and total anger, constant yelling, flares in the sky all the time, spurts from our machine guns. I know I prayed a lot, held my rosary around my neck. We prayed and remembered our relentless training and hoped the two would pull us through. And as the days went by, I realized that there was a strong possibility I wouldn’t get off Peleliu alive.
We started up the ridge October 6th. As we pressed toward the top, flamethrowers were necessary to get those animals out of the caves. The closer we got to the top, the more resistance we faced. Our second lieutenant tried to go over the top, but got hit in the shoulder and had to be moved out. Machine gunners were given orders to spray the ridges, especially the caves where the bastards hid.
Our squad had been hit hard. There were 15 of us on September 15th, and now there were five of us left and most of us were sick. I turned around and asked for more ammunition, and I only had five more rounds left. I hadn’t realized my right knee was exposed; something made my left ear ring. I looked down and saw that my right knee had been shot off by a sniper hidden in a cave. I laid flat on the ground so he couldn’t get another good shot at me. They located the cave and a flamethrower came up and filled the cave with flames. That Jap came running out, flames all over him—completely engulfed. I fired a burst at him. It was all over then.[54]
Casualties were very heavy. The 1st Marine Division lost 1,252 killed and over 5,700 wounded or missing. The 81st Infantry Division, sent in to relieve the Marines, lost over 540 dead and 2,700 wounded or missing in action. The battle remains controversial since it was never used as a staging area for the invasion of the Philippines or any other subsequent operations, though it did draw some Japanese troops away from the Philippines. Nearly 10,700 Japanese were killed on the tiny island.
Jim Butterfield
You’ve got to stop and remember when you’re studying about these islands that the Japanese had ten years of war before we got into it, before they bombed Pearl Harbor. They were at China, Korea, and other places over there. These people were good. On these islands, they were digging [fortifications] for years! They didn’t meet you out on the beaches; we had to go get them; they knew what we were going to do, and they were good.
The purpose at Peleliu was to take that airport and securely keep it. It was also to draw troops from the Philippines. MacArthur was getting ready to go in there. I guess we pulled a couple of divisions out. Peleliu, in the last five years, has come forward to become one of the biggest battles of the Pacific. In fact, after we secured Peleliu, it came out in Time Magazine with MacArthur that it wasn’t really necessary that we took Peleliu. Now this doesn’t make you feel too good, when all your friends are gone, but it brought back some memories. I was up there for 74 days and fortunately, I did not get wounded. I lost part of my hearing up there but, otherwise, I came out pretty good. It was the [bitterest] battle of the Marine Corps in World War II. There’s no doubt about it.[55]
chapter nine
Captivity-Year 3
The Hellships
As the Marines prepared for combat on Peleliu, Robert Blakeslee was herded with 750 other American prisoners aboard a decrepit prison ship for transport to Japan for slave labor. Nearly 19,000 men were transported in the stifling holds of these unmarked ‘hellships’, destined to be used by Japanese industrialists for slave labor. At least sixty percent of these prisoners never made it to Japan alive due to submarine and air attacks, unsanitary and inhumane conditions, and the brutal treatment of their captors[56].
After 28 months in captivity and 19 days of brutal conditions in the bottom of the hold of the transport, Blakeslee’s ship would be torpedoed by the USS Paddle, an American submarine. He would be one of only 83 survivors, as he later relayed in a 1945 debriefing.
Robert Blakeslee
During the summer [of 1944], we began to hear rumors that we might be shipped to Japan—we heard that the men in No. 2 Camp at Davao had been shipped out early in June. The Japs were getting uneasy and we were pretty sure the Yanks were getting near. We knew they had taken over the Solomons and that they were in New Guinea. This airfield they made us work on was a re-fueling point for planes being ferried southward, and it bristled with anti-aircraft guns. When we learned of bullet-riddled Jap planes arriving at a nearby navy air field, we knew for sure the Yanks were not too far away.
Finally, on Aug. 5th they told us to get ready to move. They said we were to be taken to Japan and put aboard an exchange ship to be exchanged f
or Japanese nationals that were U.S. prisoners. I guess we only half-believed that story, but in any case Lasang [Japanese airfield] seemed like a good place to be away from. You see, we figured if the Yanks moved in, either one of two things probably would happen: the Japs would shoot all of us, or a lot of us would get killed trying to make a break for freedom.
They gave us back the shoes we had gotten from the Red Cross way back in February, and the last of four packages of food, candy, cigarettes that had arrived at the same time. We had worn those shoes only a month when there was an escape from the camp and they were taken away. From then on, we were bare-footed. Incidentally, those shoes upset the Jap soldiers. They had rubber soles and heels. Their officers had told them America didn't have any rubber.
As it turned out, we had our shoes back only for one day. The Japanese major who had been in command moved out, leaving a first lieutenant in command. Also, he cut us down to two meals a day, one of rice and salt and the other a pasty mixture of camotes, something like a sweet potato, and squash. We were on that diet for two weeks.
During that time we saw the first Allied planes we had seen since before the fall of Bataan. There were air raid alerts nearly every night, and one night a single multi-motored plane came over and we heard bomb explosions nearby. It was one of the sweetest sounds I've ever heard!
The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation From Hometown, USA-Volume I: Voices of the Pacific Theater Page 10