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

by Bill Sloan

  As the sky grew lighter Lieutenant Luke Hammond could see objects moving about thirty yards ahead of him. He saw men from the front-line battalions falling back, and he caught a glimpse of O’Brien talking to someone on his field telephone.

  “Hold the line, and stay up there,” Hammond thought he heard O’Brien say. Then O’Brien threw down the phone and yelled at a soldier running by, “Where in the hell are you going?”

  The soldier waved his arms and said, “I have no weapon!” and ran on.

  O’Brien turned to Hammond and shouted, “As long as one of my men is up there, I’m going to be with them!” Then he was gone.

  “We’ve got to fight and hold this line,” Hammond told his men. “We’ve got to hold the 1st Battalion CP at all costs.” He crawled into the concrete cistern near his foxhole and looked out at the enemy. Fifty yards away he saw a huge mass of people—hundreds of yelling Japanese approaching.

  Several other soldiers jumped into the concrete cistern. “Okay, let’s hold here,” they said and immediately began to fire at the enemy.

  Just thirty yards away Hammond saw two Japanese soldiers jumping among the dead and dying Americans and swinging their samurai swords at them. He and several others fired at them, and they went down. Then he turned his carbine toward the other Japanese. Targets were plentiful and so close there was no excuse for missing, so Hammond gave some of his ammunition to Captain John Bennett, a naval liaison officer, who had run out. Hammond figured the two of them could use it to better advantage if he shared.

  Hammond left the cistern and moved to a position behind a concrete wall, firing at Japanese no more than thirty yards away. He felt a slight jar and heard a plunking sound as a bullet smacked into his helmet. The pain was slight and he couldn’t tell exactly where the wound was, but blood was streaming down from under his helmet.

  He calmly emptied his carbine at the enemy, then allowed one of the cooks from the Headquarters Company to apply a bandage to the wound on the side of his head. He put his helmet on, reloaded his carbine, and started back along the railroad tracks, dodging bullets and looking for an aid station.

  Still waving a pistol in each hand, O’Brien continued to run back and forth along the front line until a bullet hit him in his right shoulder. He shook off attempts to evacuate him but eventually allowed a bandage to be applied to the wound by medic Sergeant Walter Grigas. As Grigas applied the dressing, O’Brien leaned on his right knee, firing his pistol with his left hand and yelling, “Don’t give them a damn inch!” He paused just long enough to tell Grigas, “Get the hell back where you belong!”

  Out of ammunition for his pistols, O’Brien jumped into a foxhole, snatched a rifle from a wounded man, and emptied the gun in the direction of the Japanese. Then he ran to a Jeep parked in the middle of the 1st Battalion perimeter and took control of the .50-caliber machine gun mounted on it. He fired until that too ran out of ammunition.

  O’Brien grabbed a saber from a fallen Japanese and continued to stand atop the vehicle, flailing away at a small army of assailants and hollering, “Don’t give them a damn inch!” until he was cut to pieces. When his body was recovered the next day thirty dead Japanese were piled around him.

  Captain Ben Salomon, a dentist from Los Angeles, had started duty that morning as regimental dental officer of the 2nd Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment. When the doctor who usually cared for the wounded was hit, Salomon volunteered to replace him in an aid station close behind the front lines. Fighting was heavy, and the Japanese soon overran the defenses and then the aid station, where Salomon was working to save the lives of approximately thirty wounded soldiers who had walked, crawled, or been carried there.

  When Salomon saw a Japanese soldier in the act of bayoneting a wounded American soldier lying near the tent, he drew his pistol and fired from a squatting position, killing the enemy soldier. As he turned his attention back to the wounded men, more Japanese soldiers appeared at the entrance of the tent. Rushing them with a rifle, Salomon kicked a knife out of the hand of one, shot another, and bayoneted a third.

  Recognizing the danger of their position, Salomon ordered the wounded to make their way as best they could back to the regimental aid station while he attempted to hold off the enemy until his patients had made it to safety. He grabbed a rifle from a wounded man, and when four American soldiers were killed while manning a nearby machine gun, Salomon seized control of it. According to eyewitnesses, Salomon fired the gun so quickly and accurately that dead Japanese kept piling up in front of the gun and obstructing his view. He had to move the gun at least four times to maintain a field of fire.

  When an Army team returned to the site a couple of days later, they found Salomon’s body slumped over the machine gun. Lying before him were ninety-eight dead enemy soldiers in front of his position. He had seventy-six bullet wounds and countless bayonet wounds. He was belatedly awarded the Medal of Honor by President George W. Bush some fifty-eight years later in 2002.

  In less than half an hour of combat the 1st and 2nd Battalions were overrun as the Japanese tide swept through them and they tried in vain to regroup. The fighting had quickly degenerated into hand-to-hand combat, with every American soldier battling for his life against overwhelming odds. Any survivors stumbled south toward Tanapag before the onslaught.

  Private First Class William Hawrylak had been back with A Company, 1st Battalion just one day when all hell broke loose. He had gone AWOL from the hospital where he was being treated for previous wounds to rejoin his comrades in arms. That morning he received a saber thrust from a Japanese officer that came close to cutting off his entire buttocks. Although bleeding heavily and unable to walk and with nearly every other American near him either dead or dying, Hawrylak continued to fire his submachine gun.

  When Staff Sergeant Dominic Daurio of Valley Falls, New York, Hawrylak’s squad leader, ordered him to vacate his foxhole because another Japanese wave was imminent, Hawrylak yelled, “Hell no! I like it here. Besides, I got no ass. How can I walk?”

  Daurio unceremoniously picked up Hawrylak and carried him toward the rear. Halfway down the beach Daurio got help from another man, but Hawrylak was bleeding so profusely that he finally had to be laid on the ground. Daurio gave Hawrylak a sulfa pill when they stopped, then placed him in a foxhole for his own protection. Hawrylak refused to stay in the foxhole and spent the next several hours crawling around the perimeter, collecting discarded ammunition and cleaning weapons for men still able to load and fire. He was eventually evacuated and survived the battle.

  Lieutenant John Mulhern of Portland, Maine, would be remembered as the only officer of B Company, 1st Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment, to survive the gyokusai without injury. As he retreated that morning Mulhern picked up a wounded soldier, Private Anthony LaSorta from San Jose, California, who had a broken leg caused by machine gunfire. Mulhorn attempted to take him to the rear, but as soon as he put LaSorta on his back, an enemy machine gun opened fire and blew LaSorta to pieces. A few moments later, when Mulhern struggled to his feet, he was amazed to find that he didn’t have a single scratch.

  The men of the 105th were losing many officers as organization collapsed around them, ammunition ran desperately short, and Japanese troops eagerly scooped up rifles and ammo from dead Americans. The toll of dead and critically wounded officers steadily grew as the assault raged on.

  Lieutenant Robert McGuire, an H Company platoon leader, was wounded in the initial enemy assault that morning. When he saw his company’s machine guns being overrun by the Japanese, he ran to the front line and took control of one of the guns, continuing to fire it into repeated charges by the Japanese. No one knows how many times he was hit before he was killed, but he was riddled with bullets. One of the H Company men approached him and urged him to leave the gun and go to the rear so that his many wounds could be treated.

  “I’d rather stay here,” he said. He died shortly after.

  A stray bullet hit and killed Lieutenant George Dolline
r of Battle Creek, Michigan, a member of the 1st Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment, as he led his men during the American withdrawal from the front lines early that morning.

  “We called him ‘Daddy,’” said Sergeant Michael Mele, who was also from Battle Creek. “He was an inspiration to us all. I was beside him when he got it. He died instantly. If the Army ever had a braver officer, we’d sure like to meet him.”

  First Lieutenant Hugh King of Hewlett, Long Island, who had assumed command of B Company, 1st Battalion, 105th, when Captain Richard Ryan was killed, died when a mortar shell struck him as he was directing traffic and shouting encouragement to his men. Moments earlier Sergeant James Rhodes of Tell City, Indiana, had been killed when a grenade hit him squarely in the face.

  Twenty-one men from B Company, 105th, were killed in the fighting at the First Perimeter that morning, including one entire squad commanded by Sergeant Barney Stopera. The squad had stood its ground even after its ammunition was gone, with Stopera leading them in hand-to-hand fighting against rapidly increasing numbers. After the battle every member of the eight-man squad was found dead in a tight group. About thirty dead Japanese lay around them.

  In the 2nd Battalion both E and F Companies suffered severe casualties early in the fighting. F Company alone lost twenty-three men, and E Company suffered sixteen fatalities. Lieutenant John Titterington, F Company’s commander, was hit early in an initial charge by the Japanese, but he dragged himself from one machine gun to the next until he could find someone else to take over.

  A company clerk would find Titterington at about 0830 and urged him to take time off to get his wound dressed, but Titterington declined. “I’ve got to go, I guess,” he said, “but if I do go, I’m going to take a helluva lot of those son of a bitches with me.” True to his word, he died at the machine gun.

  AT 0700, SOON AFTER the Americans first reached Tanapag, they were attacked by the left flank of the Japanese, which had come down along the cliffs and knocked out the 10th Marines artillery positions. Two officers, Captain Earl White, commander of F Company of the 105th, who had been badly wounded and was now limping along on one leg, and Lieutenant Hugh King, who had assumed command of B Company, 1st Battalion, 105th, after Captain Paul Ryan was killed earlier in the day, took charge of the situation. Directing the men to dig in where they were and make a stand, they managed to stem the wild rush to find cover. King was killed while directing this operation, but the men had found a place where they could put up a fight.

  By 0800 what would later be called the Second Perimeter was set up around Tanapag as survivors from the 1st and 2nd continued to straggle in before the enemy advance. They did what they could to set up defensive positions on the edges of the village and moved the wounded into the small wooden and concrete buildings in its center. There were almost no medical supplies and few medics, and much of the first aid was one wounded man doing what he could for another. The medics constantly risked their lives moving between first aid stations to administer to the wounded.

  Directed by Major Edward McCarthy, the only officer of the 2nd Battalion, 105th, not killed or wounded that day, the Second Perimeter took up most of the village of Tanapag. It was a desperate, hastily built affair requiring a lot of bullet-dodging work. The men who organized it had an almost impossible chance of digging in and protecting themselves, but by a near-miracle they accomplished their task. Small houses built by the Japanese and constructed of concrete offered the wounded who could get inside protection from small-arms fire. Other houses, made of wood, provided air spaces between the bottom floor and the ground where soldiers from the 105th could protect themselves from stray bullets.

  Trenches ran throughout Tanapag. Although they were shallow in spots, the Americans improved them when they weren’t firing until they had fairly good foxholes. The trenches were not closed circles. Large gaps existed throughout their length, and many of them were not covered by American fire. Groups of enemy soldiers could—and did—infiltrate the ditches, but the majority were killed before they did any harm. Most of the wounded found their way into these ditches and spent hours huddled there. The men charged with defending the Second Perimeter were also dependent on this trench system for cover.

  With these makeshift emplacements as their only protection, the surviving men of the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment were swept up in the midst of a furious assault as the Japanese struck with every kind of weapon—rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenades, samurai swords, and knives on sticks.

  Private John Purcell of Schenectady, New York, in E Company of the 105th, was stationed at the Second Perimeter. In the afternoon he lined up eight rifles along a stretch of trench covering a clearing used frequently by charging Japanese. Then he ran from one rifle to another, pulling the triggers as the Japanese attacked. In between enemy thrusts he hurriedly reloaded the rifles, prepared for the next charge, collected loose ammunition, and filled clips with bullets. “I felt like the proverbial one-armed paperhanger with the seven-year itch,” he remembered. His action helped to save the American line, which was under continuous sniping by the Japanese against a beach position that sheltered many American wounded. For his heroism Purcell would be awarded the Silver Star.

  Not long after the Second Perimeter was established, Private First Class Charles Emig of A Company, 105th, took up a position along the line of small houses where the wounded were lying. He and a few other men discovered that Japanese soldiers had infiltrated some of the houses where the wounded lay. They decided to clear them out. For the next four or five hours Emig moved from window to window inside the house, firing at any enemy who lifted his head.

  When enemy mortar barrages began falling they came dangerously close to the wounded men, and Emig decided to move them to a ditch where they would be safer from mortar fragments. He covered the exit of most of the wounded, but he was shot down and killed as he crossed a window opening to help one of the last few soldiers.

  The longest and by far the most crucial period for the survivors of the 1st and 2nd rifle companies of the 105th Infantry was securing the thin Second Perimeter against the Japanese attackers. Private First Class Mark Winter was one of those protectors. He had been seriously wounded earlier and was hit again shortly after getting inside the Second Perimeter. He was unable to move under his own power, but he managed to talk someone into propping him up into a firing position.

  From that point on, he fired his carbine slowly and deliberately for much of the morning and managed to hit several Japanese. When he finally ran out of ammunition, he hailed a soldier and asked for an M-1 rifle lying nearby. The soldier protested, telling Winter he shouldn’t be firing from such an exposed position that was well above ground level.

  “I’ll stay here and fire until I get the last Jap—or they get me,” Winter said. Later in the day he was killed on the spot where he lay, but not by a sniper—he was hit by artillery.

  AS THE DAY WORE ON, the number of injured soldiers steadily grew. Some were so badly wounded that they could take no part in defending the Second Perimeter. They did what they could by remaining quiet, although many were in such extreme pain that they wanted to scream.

  Sergeant Attilio Grestini of B Company, from Cohoes, a mill town north of Albany, New York, had remained active all morning in a rifle position near the northeast corner of the Second Perimeter. When a sudden burst of artillery fire fell near him, one shell blew Grestini’s left arm completely off and mangled his left leg at the hip. He lay there for an hour or more without uttering a sound, biting his lips to keep from crying out. Staff Sergeants John Sidur and John Goot, B Company, found him and insisted on trying to help him, carrying him on a rifle to the center of the Second Perimeter, where he refused any further assistance.

  Instead, he somehow applied tourniquets to his arm and leg, then sat quietly for the rest of the day. He had neither medical treatment nor drugs to ease the pain. He was later transferred to a hospital ship, survived the war, and later moved to
Chicago and raised a family.

  Sidur also saved Corporal Wilfred “Spike” Mailloux when he found him seriously wounded an hour or so after the incident with Grestini. Mailloux had met Sidur in Cohoes, where they both lived in 1940. At the time Mailloux was sixteen and Sidur was twenty-two. When Sidur spotted Mailloux in a muddy ditch, bleeding profusely from a stab wound delivered by a Japanese officer with a long knife, he didn’t recognize him at first. Then he thought, Boy, he really looks familiar. Mailloux had been injured when the enemy overran the 1st and 2nd Platoons of the 105th Infantry Regiment.

  As the Americans continued to fight, Sidur too was wounded in the arm. Late in the afternoon, after the attack subsided and he left Tanapag with his comrades, he had to use one end of the rifle to lean on. He managed to walk out very slowly with the rest of his platoon. On his way a couple of Japanese jumped up, and the wounded men fully expected to be killed right there. “For some reason they didn’t shoot,” Sidur said. “They let the Americans pass.” Later on Sidur would wonder whether the Japanese were actually trying to surrender.

  SOON THE SECOND PERIMETER was surrounded, and all along it a ragged, thin line stretched in a half moon from beach side to beach. The fight was a series of all-out clashes, much of them hand-to-hand, as wave after wave of suicidal Japanese hurled themselves against the exhausted American soldiers. Over the next four hours a gutsy stand would be made that would constitute one of the great defensive maneuvers in American military history.

  With nearly all the commissioned officers killed or wounded during the attack, the sergeants, corporals, and sometimes privates were left to assume the roles of leadership. The senior sergeants especially assumed command of their units.

  Sergeant John Domanowski, B Company, First Battalion, 105th, was shot in one arm during the initial banzai attack. About midmorning, as he made his way back to the rear along the beach, he stopped to rest under a tree. A Japanese soldier hiding in the tree shot him in the other arm.