Their Backs against the Sea: The Battle of Saipan and the Largest Banzai Attack of World War II

by Bill Sloan

The sergeant nodded.

  “Is he alive?” Roush asked, and the sergeant shook his head.

  Roush walked over and touched Cunningham and whispered his name. “Cunningham opened his eyes and looked at me,” remembered Roush, “and it scared the hell out of me. I thought a dead man had come back to life.”

  Cunningham had been shot through the right side. He had also been shot on the cheekbone below his eye, and that bullet had exited through his ear. A third bullet had struck him in his lower neck; that round had lodged in his body. He also had another bullet wound near his heart.

  When Roush opened his canteen, Cunningham grabbed it with both hands and started chugging water. Roush knew that so much water could make a thirsty man sick, so after he drank about half of it, Roush pulled it away.

  There weren’t any stretchers in the area, but a small Japanese shack stood maybe a hundred yards away. Roush got one of the other guys to go with him, and they tore off a door and then used it to carry Cunningham to an aid station. Roush didn’t see how he could possibly live with all those wounds, but at least he could say he tried.

  Roush found out later how Cunningham had been shot up so severely. Earlier that morning a group of engineers had pulled a light 37-millimeter cannon off the road and taken it down onto the sandy beach where they could get a better field of fire. Within minutes the men attempting to fire the gun were either killed or wounded.

  “But here came Cunningham again,” said Roush. “He manned the gun by himself and got off a series of shots with it until a Japanese machine gun finally found him and riddled him with bullets.” When Cunningham was left at the aid station, everyone who saw him was certain he would soon die.

  About six months later Roush got rotated back to the States. While in the chow line at the Marine Corps depot in San Diego he saw Cunningham in uniform standing in line. He thought for a minute he was seeing a ghost, but he slowly walked up to him.

  “How’re you doing?” Roush said.

  “Well, I still can’t hear anything out of this ear,” Cunningham said. “But other than that, I’m okay.”

  BY THE MORNING of 16 June everything about Saipan had changed. On 15 June, when the landings began, Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner had been jauntily predicting that Saipan would collapse within a week. Now Turner and Lieutenant General Holland Smith faced the disturbing news that none of their Marine units had managed to get more than halfway to their objectives on the opening day of battle. It was clear that the initial plans had underestimated the size of the Japanese forces on Saipan.

  It was also clear that the Army’s 27th Infantry Division, which had been originally slated as the reserve force for Saipan—and that Holland Smith didn’t trust in the slightest—would have to be committed to the battle. After his experience with the 27th at Makin and Eniwetok, Smith was reluctant to use them again in the Marianas. But they were the only troops available in Hawaii, so he had to take them.

  The 6th Marines were busy mopping up pockets of Japanese resistance behind the US lines, left there after the counterattack of the previous evening. Their work proceeded at a slow pace—finding the Japs in their holes and using grenades and flamethrowers to flush them out.

  Meanwhile the 8th and 23rd Marines linked up at Charan Kanoa, closing a dangerous gap in the lines by moving up to the edge of Lake Susupe, a shallow body of water, and pausing there. Early on the morning of 16 June about two hundred Japanese moved through another gap in the lines between divisions. Fortunately troops from the 23rd Marines were able to hold onto their position and kill many of the advancing Japanese.

  That night Holland Smith had ordered the 27th Division to begin landing its troops, and it was obvious by now that the Marines would need these reserves if they were to move ahead. Upon landing, the 27th pushed forward to Aslito Airfield where they were about to surprise the unsuspecting Japanese.

  BY THE TIME darkness fell on 16 June, twenty thousand Marines—if the dead and injured were included—had come ashore on Saipan. The troops had established a beachhead about ten thousand yards long and over a thousand yards deep in most places. Two divisions were in place with most of their reserves. Seven battalions of artillery had landed, and so had most of two tank battalions.

  The troops began to dig in. Both division command posts were set up, although the 6th Marines’ regimental commander, Colonel James Riseley, established his CP practically at the water’s edge. The 4th Division commander, General Harry Schmidt, established a command post that was actually a series of foxholes about fifty yards from the beach. It was poorly protected from enemy light artillery, which was firing from the high ground some fifteen hundred yards away.

  Meanwhile, south of Afetna Point, the 4th Marine Division was having its own share of problems. Opposition in the rubble of the town of Charan Kanoa was comparatively light, but Japanese riflemen still sniped away at Marines as they moved through.

  As for the Japanese, their artillery had taken a heavy toll. The US landings had been made against what the enemy considered his strongest points, and at a time when the defending garrison was four battalions above strength, massing at least sixteen 105-millimeter howitzers and 75-millimeter field pieces on the nearest high ground. Directly east of the island’s airstrip they emplaced a 150-millimeter, four-weapon howitzer battery with a similar battery south of it. All of these weapons were well situated, and they poured a tremendous amount of fire on the landing beaches.

  MANY MARINES BELIEVED that if you heard the artillery shell, it most likely had already passed you by, and you wouldn’t hear the one with your name on it because the shell arrived before the sound did. But Private First Class Richard Hertensteiner, who joined the Marines at seventeen in his hometown of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and was experiencing his first battle at Saipan, learned that it didn’t always work that way.

  Hertensteiner, a member of an artillery battery, was talking to a couple of other Marines when they heard incoming sounds and dove into a shell crater. When the first round hit, he was the first person to fall into the hole. After the shelling he got up and began talking to the other Marines again. But they were both dead. Hertensteiner never received so much as a small scratch.

  WHEN SERGEANT HANK MICHALAK was twelve years old he was pretty sure that when he got old enough he would join the Navy. That was an unhappy time for him because his mother died that year and his father decided to leave Louisiana and move back to Texas, where Hank had been born. They settled in the town of Marlin. Hank went part of the way through high school there, but deep inside he still heard the Navy calling him.

  He was working a summer job, putting a new roof on the high school, when he and a friend decided to go to Waco and volunteer for the Navy. The friend chickened out, but on the way to the Navy recruiting office Hank happened to run into an old Marine who started telling him tales about China, and one thing led to another.

  When he left Waco he was in the Marine Corps, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines. His father signed for him, and he wound up in San Diego going to boot camp.

  One weekend in December Michalak was on liberty in Los Angeles when he heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He caught a ride back to Camp Elliott immediately. He found everybody talking about the bombing, fearful that the Japs were going to hit the West Coast.

  His first assignment was Guadalcanal, a campaign he thought would never end. Then there was terrible Tarawa, where the Marines sustained more than 4,500 casualties in three days’ time. The next operation turned out to be Saipan. Everyone was worried that it would become another Tarawa.

  “When we pulled up there and I saw the size of that island, my first thought was ‘Man, that’s going to be a good deal,’” Michalak remembered. “That was a big island compared to what Tarawa was. Saipan had mountains on it, big mountains. And we got ashore okay. The Japs had it pretty well fortified, but we were able to land without the same kind of catastrophe that we had at Tarawa, and that was a relief.”

  During the second day on Saipan
some of the 2nd Marines had advanced to the edge of the foothills of Mount Tapotchau. “The Japs were on the high ground, and we knew or suspected that something was going on up there,” Michalak said. “But the problem was, we didn’t know what.”

  On the third night, at about 0200 in the morning, the Japanese blew their bugles and came down that mountain like thunder, with artillery and tanks and antitank guns and anything else that would shoot. They completely overran the Marines, and that was the end of Hank’s operations on Saipan. He caught a bullet in the right elbow and some shrapnel in the hand.

  “That was the last thing I remembered,” Michalak said. “The next thing I knew, I was out on a ship, and they were wheeling me in to operate on my arm or do whatever they were going to do to it. And right there beside the door was a trash can with arms and legs sticking out of it that the doctors had just thrown in. I wasn’t fully conscious, but I thought to myself, ‘Okay, that’s where your arm is going, right there in that trash can.’”

  Michalak woke up with a cast on his arm and a separate cast on two of his knuckles that had been ripped off by the shrapnel. Eventually all the wounds healed up.

  IT WOULD BE six days before the beachhead was considered totally secure, but it was the first day’s action that was most important. After that day the most critical stage of “the most critical stage” in the invasion was behind the Marines. They, at least, were ashore.

  Nightfall came, but it brought no peace. The Marines dug in on their narrow strip of beachhead with the Philippine Sea at their backs and a vengeful enemy lurking in the darkness. Every Marine knew that a night counterattack lay ahead, and it wasn’t long in coming.

  The Japanese high command had already issued orders to drive the Americans back into the sea before daylight the next day: “The Army this evening will make a night attack with all its forces,” the 31st Army radioed Tokyo, “and expects to annihilate the enemy at one swoop!”

  To Japanese troops, the order was plain and simple: “Each unit will consolidate strategically important points and will carry out counterattacks with reserve forces and tanks against the enemy landing units and will demolish the enemy during the night at the water’s edge.”

  The 6th Marines, 2nd Division, which held the left flank of the beachhead, was the first to feel the effects of these measures. A large force of Japanese infantry, supported by tanks, charged the American lines from the north along the coastal road.

  With swords waving, flags flying, and a bugle sounding, the Japanese descended on the Marine lines. The regiment under attack had only one battalion of 75-millimeter pack howitzers at its disposal because they had been unable to land any of their 105-millimeter howitzer battalions the previous day. Naval star shells fired from US destroyers silhouetted the attackers as they approached, and the withering fire of machine guns, rifles, and naval five-inch guns stopped the attack.

  THE BATTLE EVOLVED into a madhouse of noise, tracers, and flashing lights as the tank attack came at us out of Garapan and hit our battalion on the left,” remembered Major James Donovan of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, who had fought his way through Guadalcanal and Tarawa. The Marines had been warned that an enemy tank formation would be coming down in their direction, so they were well prepared for it. They were all dug in about eight or nine hundred yards from the beach, and at about 0330 they heard the Japanese tanks coming.

  In addition to the Navy’s star shells, the Marines had their own star shells with their 60-millimeter mortars, so the area was well lit up.

  “It was an eerie scene out there,” Donovan said. “The flashing shells, the smoke drifting around, and as soon as we heard the tanks out in front, we called in our supporting artillery fire, and all our own supporting weapons—mortars, antitank grenades, bazookas, and demolition charges.”

  As enemy tanks were hit and set afire, they illuminated other tanks coming out of the flickering shadows toward the front. In the dense darkness Marines saw only a few tanks at a time. Moving out of their holes, they attacked them with antitank grenades, bazookas, and hand grenades.

  Then Marine machine guns opened up, and the Japanese foot soldiers following the tanks were badly cut up. Before that battle was over, they had destroyed twenty-seven to thirty tanks, and the supporting infantry men were all dead. That tank battle went into the record books as the largest of the Pacific War up to that time. When the confrontation ended after about forty-five minutes, the 6th Marines had polished off twenty-four of the tanks in hand-to-hand fighting.

  “The Marine bazookas had proved amazingly effective against those thin-skinned Japanese tanks of that period,” said Donovan. “There were no prisoners among the foot soldiers. We killed them all.”

  Among the men who became heroes that day was twenty-year-old Sergeant Jim Evans of the 6th Marines. He’d been a Marine for four years and had seen action at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa. When a Japanese tank stopped near him and the hatch opened to allow the driver to peer through the smoke, Evans shot the driver and hurled a phosphorous grenade into the tank.

  Not far away Corporal William Jefferies and his buddy, Private First Class Bob Reed, both of the 6th Marines, fired their bazooka shells and knocked out four enemy tanks. Reed received a Navy Cross for jumping on top of a fifth tank and disabling it with an incendiary grenade in the turret. Jefferies received a Silver Star.

  THE 8TH MARINES, meanwhile, were pushing east in the seemingly endless swampland around Lake Susupe. Men found themselves standing waist-deep in muck that stretched a thousand yards north and south of the lake. The area was covered with nests of snipers, with Japanese soldiers holding positions both in the swamp and to the east and south of the lake.

  Simultaneously, the 2nd Marines moved up the coast toward Garapan, and the 6th Marines moved northeast toward the densely defended hills. Navy battleships and cruisers—those that hadn’t accompanied Admirals Raymond Spruance and Marc Mitscher on their “Turkey Shoot” in the Philippine Sea—began a heavy bombardment of Garapan, a town already pounded and flattened by naval gunfire.

  “The city was gone by the time we occupied it,” remembered medical Corpsman Chester Szech, who carried a .45-caliber pistol and a carbine and whose Marine uniform was similar to an infantryman. The entire population had moved into the hills and nearby caves. Small clusters of Japanese troops hidden among the ruins of the town seemed at first to be the only opposition, but that afternoon seven tanks showed up. The Marines responded with bazookas and grenades until six of the tanks were destroyed.

  I WAS CRITICIZED FOR being too much of a Marine and not enough of a pharmacist’s mate,” recalled H. L. Obermiller, who had somehow managed to join the Navy and in some peculiar fashion had ended up in the Marine Corps as a pharmacist’s mate.

  The youngster from Milam County, Texas, took a troop train to San Diego, where he was sworn in, went through boot camp, and then had a chance to leave the Navy and join the Marines. “So I grabbed it,” he said.

  From the beginning Pharmacist’s Mate Obermiller enjoyed carrying a rifle—and he was pretty good with it. He liked to go out with the Marines, and he could shoot as well as they could. He could also out-walk them, as he’d been raised on a farm and had to walk three or four miles to school every day. He didn’t wear the Red Cross emblem on his sleeve as they did at Guadalcanal, where the Japs used the red cross for target practice, but he knew that if the Japanese on Saipan could pick out a pharmacist’s mate or an officer, they would shoot the pharmacist’s mate first.

  When Obermiller’s Higgins boat landed on Saipan, the sky was lit up with shells and flares. As they made their way through the town of Garapan an officer called out to him.

  “There are some Navy frogmen who came ashore on the wrong side of town,” he said. “Now they’re behind Japanese lines, and they’ve gotten ambushed. You think you can get them out?”

  Obermiller said he would try. “So I go down there and get to the Jap lines, and there was a fence I crawled under. I found the guys,
and there were six or seven of them, but I never heard any of them speak a word, I guess because they were too scared. I got them out of there by crawling on our bellies back to our lines. I told them to line up behind me one by one and walk up the main street.

  “As I walked, I shouted, ‘Marines coming through! Marines coming through!’ so the US sentries wouldn’t shoot us,” he said. “So I got them all the way to sick bay and then went back to my bunk.”

  From that point on, it was rough going. “The Japs decided that they would come down and hit us, and they were well trained and potent,” he said. “They didn’t seem to have any scruples at all. They didn’t care if they got killed or not.

  “I don’t know how I did it. I knew I was walking into sudden death, but somehow that was just the way it was. With the Marines, you’re trained to just accept things as they come. You don’t question orders. When the officer has one more stripe than you do, when he says jump, you jump.”

  Even with the help of a pharmacist’s mate, it would take the 2nd Marines until 3 July to root out the last of the Japanese from their underground caves and pillboxes amid the carnage of Garapan.

  Sergeant Arwin Bowden, who was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, was a radio and telephone man, and that first night he set up his radio in a concrete building in Garapan that originally had been a Japanese burial crypt. Shelves ran all the way around the crypt, and urns were everywhere.

  “About two o’clock in the morning the Japs made their final run at us,” Bowden recalled, “and they lost five of their 10th Marines’ 105-millimeter artillery pieces in that blast.

  “By daylight we were back in the lines, and it was kill or be killed. That was all there was to it,” Bowden said. “In an area about half a mile square there were about three thousand Japanese bodies. They sent in bulldozers to cut trenches. Then the same bulldozers just pushed the bodies into the trenches and covered them up. Some of the Japs surrendered, but some of them wouldn’t. Those that wouldn’t should have.”