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

by Bill Sloan

  Shortly before 0900 large numbers of enemy soldiers were reported withdrawing from the battle area. The ridge that had caused so much trouble the day before was basically abandoned, opening the way for a remarkably easy capture of Aslito Airfield.

  In addition to planting artillery on Nafutan Point, many of the Japanese troops leaving the airfield were withdrawing toward Mount Tapotchau, the highest point on the island, in the highly defensible mountainous terrain of central Saipan. With no hope of being relieved or resupplied, winning the battle had basically turned hopeless for the defenders. But the Japanese were determined to fight to the last man. Their leader, General Saito, organized his troops along a ridge where heavily armed soldiers could fire directly down on the Americans.

  The nicknames given to various places in the area—Hell’s Pocket, Purple Heart Ridge, and Death Valley—told of the brutal difficulties facing the Marines and the 27th Division in the tortuous terrain. The Americans gradually developed tactics for clearing the many caves in the volcanic landscape—using flamethrower teams supported by artillery and machine guns—but it was slow, grueling, dangerous work.

  For the record, Colonel Gerard Kelley, commanding the 165th Infantry Regiment, attacked ahead of schedule on 18 June and captured Aslito Airfield almost without firing a shot, when two previous attacks by the 27th Division had gained nothing.

  “We walked right across that field in a skirmish line, and not a damned shot was fired at us,” said Sergeant Grinaldo. “We got to the other side, and we were told to dig in again because they figured a counterattack was coming, but it never developed.”

  Staff Sergeant Jack Lent of the 2nd Marines from Dallas was pretty sure that a bullet that grazed his head and left him unconscious was as close as he’d ever come to dying in battle. But he was wrong.

  “I was sort of feeling sorry for the Japanese. I thought, ‘God, they’re going to wipe them out, the poor things!’” The Marines found out later that they probably didn’t even kill one Jap with all that shelling.

  Lent got ashore underneath a pier that reached out into the ocean. About half of the men got out of the boat and went under the pier, and about half of them stayed in the boat. Then the boat took a direct artillery hit and got blown apart. Everyone in the boat was killed.

  It seemed to Lent that he spent eight or ten hours under that pier, all the while trying to get ashore but hopelessly pinned down by the constant machine gunfire. When he finally made it to the beach it was pitch-dark.

  The next day he found his commanding officer, Colonel David Shoup, who told Lent, “We’re getting awfully bad sniper fire coming at us. Get up on that pillbox and see if you can tell where that fire is coming from.”

  Lent and another man climbed up on the pillbox, where they spotted a Jap hiding in a coconut tree. They both fired at him, and he came down head first and hit the ground. Lent was elated and had begun looking around to see if he could spot another Japanese when a bullet ripped right through his helmet and knocked him out cold.

  He woke up with Shoup pouring brandy down his throat. “That brought me around real quick,” he said, “and I felt my head to see what was left up there, but all I could feel was a little cut on the top of my skull.” A little blood was running out of the cut, so they took Lent over to sick bay and patched him up. When they were finished they handed him his helmet. He took a peek at the massive hole in it. The round would have torn his head off.

  After he recovered, Lent was assigned to take over duties as an air observer at Aslito Airfield. When the plane he was aboard started to come in for a landing he looked out the window and yelled to the pilot. “Hey, you can’t land down there!” he said, looking out. “My God, they’re still fighting for the airstrip. You’ll get us all killed!”

  “But I’ve got to land,” the pilot said. “I don’t have enough fuel to fly around all day. We’ve got no choice. I’ve got to land.”

  The plane touched down, and when it did it was literally riddled with bullets that went through the wings and fuselage. Everybody inside jumped out on the tarmac and ran like hell. By some quirk of fate, a Marine in a Jeep appeared from somewhere and screeched to a halt. “You crazy people!” he said. “Why are you landing? Can’t you see we haven’t taken the airport yet?” Somehow the man driving the Jeep got out to the Marine Corps line without anybody getting shot. The next day Lent had to take up his duties as an air observer. He had to watch everybody, even if they were going up in a PBY (a light cargo plane with no armor). That was his duty—just flying over to spot where the enemy was and relaying it to the commanding officer.

  But a funny thing happened as Lent was flying over the mountains: he spotted his old group, huddled up in an observation post. He recognized who they were and dropped a message down to them.

  “I’ll see you guys pretty soon,” it read.

  A couple of days later he found an old Japanese bicycle, got on it, and rode up the mountain to visit his buddies he hadn’t seen in six or eight months. They had a good reunion, and as he was preparing to leave, somebody asked, “How in the world did you get up here?”

  He said, “Well, I rode right up that main road on this bicycle.”

  “Holy shit,” the soldier said. “But we haven’t captured that road yet.”

  Lent had ridden through the Japanese lines on that bicycle, and now he had to go back that same way. “I think I went back about ninety miles an hour on that bike,” he remembered.

  When Lent got back to Hawaii, he put his helmet in a box and mailed it to his mother. In the meantime the War Department had sent her a telegram stating that Lent had been wounded in action, but she hadn’t yet received it.

  “She got that helmet first and thought I was dead,” Lent said. “The Dallas Morning News came over and took pictures of the helmet with my mother holding it and crying. It was the saddest picture you ever saw. I called her as soon as I was able and told her I was fine. The first thing she wanted to know was how my head was.”

  ASLITO AIRFIELD WAS under the full control of American forces on 18 June, and within four days flights of seventy-four P-47 Thunderbolt fighters were providing support for US ground troops. The field was found to be in relatively good condition, and it contained the largest cache of airplane parts and damaged aircraft captured from the Japanese up to that time.

  By the next day Seabees with bulldozers were working on the field to clear it. Also discovered and put to good use were an oxygen tank, a power plant, a million-gallon reservoir, and a number of shelters and warehouses with steel-reinforced concrete walls. Japanese troops had moved out in such haste that no demolition or destruction had been carried out.

  Thanks to the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the downing of hundreds of Japanese planes (see Chapter 5), the P-47s had almost no enemy planes in the area to interfere with them. Meanwhile the 165th and elements of the 4th Marine Division had arrived at Magicienne Bay on the east coast of Saipan, isolating the southern part of the island.

  Earlier, while two battalions of the 165th Infantry Regiment were contesting Japanese forces at Aslito Airfield and Nafutan Point, the 105th Regiment and the rest of the 165th, temporarily stranded by a shortage of Amtracks, reached land without incident. Many, however, had to wade ashore in chest-deep water to reach the town of Charan Kanoa—or what was left of it. There was nothing but twisted wreckage everywhere—and plenty of dead Japanese.

  Nevertheless, General Holland Smith and his chief of staff, Brigadier General Graves B. “Bobby” Erskine, the youngest brigadier general in the Marine Corps, came ashore and established a headquarters at Charan Kanoa. For reasons best known to him, Holland Smith never visited the front lines; instead, he received his information from Erskine—though for a period of approximately two weeks Erskine also avoided the front lines.

  As Holland Smith put it, “He was a brilliant staff officer. His office buzzed with activity and his only regret was that he could not get away more frequently to visit the front. For nearly two weeks, hi
s personal knowledge of Saipan was limited to the area immediately adjacent to our quarters. Duty tied him to his desk.”

  Erskine did supposedly remain in constant contact with officers in the 2nd and 4th Marines, and he met with Holland Smith two or three times a day to discuss the current situation and make plans for the following day.

  Just how much—if any—of Erskine’s long-distance communications problem affected Holland Smith’s advanced planning is still unknown today.

  EARLY IN THE afternoon of 18 June the 1st Battalion of the 105th Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien, got its first taste of action in the fight for Saipan. O’Brien, forty-five, had joined the 27th Division in 1918 during World War I, and he’d been with the division ever since. Before the Battle of Saipan was over, O’Brien and two other members of the regiment would be caught up in some of the fiercest fighting of the war, and all three of them would receive the Medal of Honor.

  “O’Brien was like a banty rooster,” remembered Lieutenant Joe Meighan. “He was the kind of guy who would go out and do it himself before he’d tell you to do it.”

  On 18 June O’Brien’s inexperienced troops were given the job of fighting their way eastward across the island. At first they made rapid progress, but the next day they ran into serious problems. Concentrated in an area known as Ridge 300, the Japanese had dug several strong points and pillboxes into the hilly, rocky terrain. Several 1st Battalion soldiers, faced with constant fire, volunteered to infiltrate enemy lines to destroy those positions, but machine gunfire and grenades pushed them back.

  Late in the afternoon Sergeant Thomas Baker borrowed a bazooka from a comrade. He walked out under heavy fire, knelt down, and fired his weapon into a dual-purpose gun position, knocking it out with his second round. Then he stood up and ran back to his company with machine gun bullets dancing around him all the way. His action ultimately enabled his company to take the ridge.

  STAFF SERGEANT FLOYD MUMME was one of the few Texans—if not, in fact, the only one—to become a member of the 27th Infantry Division in the early days of World War II. Mumme graduated from high school in 1936 in Alfred, Texas, and he was happily driving a truck for a local lumber yard and working in the oil business when he learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

  He was out hunting that morning when he heard it on the car radio. At twenty-three he was single and knew there was little doubt he’d be called up quickly, but it happened the very next day—on 8 December—and he was sworn in on 9 December. Mumme could scarcely believe he was in the US Army Medical Corps.

  “We didn’t have any choice in those days. We were just numbers,” he remembered. “They didn’t pay any attention to your qualifications or anything. Later on I think they did, but we got up there that day and everything was so messed up. They came down and rounded us up like a bunch of billy goats!”

  The recruits were sent to Camp Barkeley, a training camp about thirty miles south of Abilene, Texas. The training started with 3,100 men, and after six weeks they had a first shipment of 360 men ready to go. Mumme was the seventeenth man called. They were put on a train that had priority all the way to the West Coast. They were still planning to try to get a division of troops in to save the Philippines, but by the time he got there they’d changed their minds. That was supposed to be the role of the 27th Army Division, but they had backed off because the Japs had taken over too much of the Philippines by then.

  When the recruits got to Hawaii they were trained briefly with rifles. “They claimed we were the only Medical Corps group that ever got that training,” Mumme said. “Otherwise, we did stuff on bandages—how to splint things and how to clean a wound out, how to give shots and give first aid. And marching, oh yeah, there was a lot of marching.”

  A total of twenty-eight medics were attached to the Marine Corps for the trip to Saipan, each one from the 27th Division. When Saipan was over, they would return to the 27th—if any of them were still around.

  In addition to the medics there were also six doctors. Mumme and the other medics were loaded down with medical equipment. Mumme had no rifle, but he had medical pouches hanging around his waist on both sides. He carried sterile bandages and plenty of an antibacterial they used for infection in those days.

  Conditions on the beach had been considerably worse a few minutes before the medical team landed, but now the 2nd Marines had the Japanese backed up far enough that when the medics landed, they had to go around the 2nd Marines to get to the 4th Marines, which was where they were supposed to be.

  Mumme found himself surrounded by wrecked boats, debris of all kinds, and casualties. “Far too many,” he said. “We had an awful job of getting this one guy to stop bleeding. We did everything we could, and we thought we had saved him, and then he was hit by a damned stray bullet that finished him off just when we thought we had him stabilized.”

  Mumme was on hand when the first hospital ship sailed away. It was loaded to the brim, carrying more than six hundred patients. Shortly after that he and the other members of the medical team joined the engineers in constructing a new evacuation hospital on the island.

  The toughest thing he ever did was help on an amputation in which both legs had to come off above the knees. “The doctors used us medics like nurses,” he recalled. “I was there with forceps to pinch back the blood veins. Then they pulled all the way up your leg muscles and cut it where they could still pull something back over the bone.”

  Years later, when Mumme saw a man with two legs missing, he thought it might be the same guy: “They said he was a Marine and a World War II veteran, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to go up to him and ask him about it.”

  MYRON BAZAR CAME to America from the Ukraine when he was barely five years old. His mother and father were divorced, and his father had custody of the boy. They settled in Amsterdam, New York, where Bazar graduated from high school in the spring of 1941.

  At the time many male high school graduates, including some of Myron’s best friends, were joining the Army National Guard, but Bazar was in love with the Navy. “I always wanted to join the Navy,” he remembered. “I don’t know exactly why. When President Roosevelt announced he was spending a billion dollars on the Navy, I was really enthused. I was only two blocks from the post office, where the Navy recruiting officer was stationed, when the announcement was made that the Navy would be under the draft system. I heard about it on my car radio. I went straight there and told him I wanted to join up.”

  Bazar and other recruits went to Albany and boarded a train going to Newport, Rhode Island, where they spent the next three months in training. But when it was completed he was told he would be going to Boston for more training.

  “You’re going to the Wentworth Institute, which is a technical school that’s been taken over by the Navy to train engineers,” an officer told him. “The best part is that you’re going to stay at the Somerset Hotel, the best lodging in the Back Bay section of Boston.”

  The young Navy recruit found the Wentworth Institute amazing. “They took me to Boston, and this hotel was unbelievable,” Bazar said. “They kept the same staff, used the same kitchen, the same chef, the same waiters, the same food they served the civilians. The program was four months long, and I was relieved of all duties except studying. I had weekends off, and I brought my car—a 1941 Plymouth—up from Amsterdam and spent the evenings cruising around Boston.”

  Along with all this, he found time to study the engineering of pumps, turbines, steering mechanisms, refrigeration, and other technical aspects aboard ships. When it came time to graduate with a rank of petty officer, his commanding officer called him in and said, “You’re a lucky guy. Washington’s decided to send you to Syracuse for additional training.”

  “In what?” Bazar asked.

  “The Carrier Corporation has a small school there where they teach refrigeration and air conditioning, and you’ve been selected to go there.” Bazar laughed as he remembered it. “You’ll get an a
llowance, and you can live anyplace you want. You’ll have to be at work at eight o’clock in the morning, and you’re out at four or five o’clock in the afternoon. You’re on your own.”

  Bazar studied at Carrier with ten other Navy students, all of them learning air conditioning and refrigeration. After about five weeks he took a train to San Francisco, where a new fleet oil tanker was under construction. He was assigned to handle all the air conditioning for officers’ quarters.

  Before leaving, Petty Officer Bazar sold his two-year-old 1941 Plymouth for $1,100—he’d only paid $700 for it brand new. During the train ride along the way he discovered another America.

  “The train would stop in these small towns out in the Midwest, wherever a water tower was located,” he said, “and the women from these towns would come down to the train with food and clothing and everything they could possibly give you that you might need. They’d give you sweaters and socks and sandwiches. They were too remote from the big cities to do anything in the factories, but what they could do is give whatever they could to the troops.”

  In San Francisco the ship was being built in a new Kaiser shipbuilding plant, and Bazar was told it would take four months to complete. “There’s only seven Navy men aboard,” he was told. “You’re one of the seven. All the rest are civilian workers. Your job is going to be to walk around and make sure everybody’s working and nobody’s sleeping. You’ll be given a sizable allowance for food and clothing. Good luck.”

  By this time Bazar was getting used to being spoiled. “They gave me an armband that said SP for ‘shore patrol.’ For four months I couldn’t find a person who was sloughing off or sleeping or doing anything wrong. Everybody was so patriotic. It was unbelievable.

  “At that time Americans’ feelings weren’t so much against Hitler as they were against Tojo because of what he’d done at Pearl Harbor,” he said. “Americans had the feeling that, ‘We’re gonna get those Japs if it’s the last thing we do!’ Even when we got involved in the war in Europe, it was never Hitler. It was, ‘Let the Europeans take care of Hitler. We’ll take care of Tojo!’”