by Bill Sloan
Out of this came a move to nominate Gabaldon for the Congressional Medal of Honor, and Colonel Schwabe officially recommended him for this one. He had already received the Silver Star, and in 1960 the Pentagon upgraded that to a Navy Cross, the second-highest honor in the Navy’s arsenal of awards.
“It is particularly significant that for the most part Gabaldon captured these prisoners entirely by himself,” Colonel Schwabe’s recommendation said. “Furthermore, most of these activities were strictly voluntary and far and above the call of duty.”
A documentary film, released in 2008 and entitled East L.A. Marine, posed the question of whether Gabaldon’s Hispanic heritage played a part in him not receiving the medal. Other sources have blamed his tough and outspoken nature. Some claimed that his feats didn’t measure up to those of other heroes on Saipan.
Guy Gabaldon died on 31 August 2006. Almost all the Marines who championed his cause have also died, and as of 2017 he has not received the Medal of Honor.
GABALDON’S SKILL AT TALKING the Japanese out of their hiding places was not the norm. Most of the time it was the other way around. “We saw hundreds of bodies, lying in the surf or lying dead on the rocks below,” remembered Private Clifford Howe of Havre, Montana, serving with the 1st Battalion, 165th Infantry Regiment. “It made even the most hardened American soldiers sick to see this.”
Marpi Point was a long plateau where the Japanese had built an auxiliary airfield. Its landscape contained a honeycomb of caves, the last refuge of hundreds of Japanese troops and civilians. At the edge of the plateau there was a sheer eight-hundred-foot drop to jagged coral below that bordered the sea. Marines learned to call the precipice “Suicide Cliff” or “Banzai Cliff.” Whole families gathered there at the edge of the cliff, then leapt off. Another cliff, 265 feet above the ocean, was also the site of many Japanese suicides. When the suicides ended, the areas below them were stained red with human blood.
“You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it,” said one Marine who was part of a group working with ropes to pick up the bodies of two Americans who had been killed there. There were hundreds of Jap civilians—men, women, and children—up there on the cliff. In the most routine way they would jump off the cliff or climb down and wade into the sea. “I saw a father throw his three children off and then jump down himself,” said the Marine.
Corporal Canara Caruth, the commander of a 2nd Armored Amphibian tank attached to the 2nd Marines, saw a woman throw her children over the cliff, then jump after them. Some photographers took her picture when she was falling. “I guess she thought we were going to take her babies and eat them,” Caruth recalled. “I saw a lot of terrible things at Saipan, but I think that was the worst thing I ever saw.”
Sergeant Tom Tinsley recalled, “Some children were killed by holding their feet and beating their heads against the rocks. Any civilians that didn’t kill themselves, the Japanese soldiers would kill with hand grenades. Some used swords to cut off the heads of the children. The bottom of the cliff at Marpi Point was a horrendous mass of bodies, both military and civilian. This was a hell of a price to pay for an island not any larger than Fort Smith, Arkansas.”
SERGEANT DAVID DOWDAKIN of I Company, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, described the bloody, disturbing events at the northern end of Saipan in the aftermath of the gyokusai.
“We dug in a double line on either side of the road—one facing toward the cliff and one facing toward the sea,” said Dowdakin. “We were keeping our normal watch on at night so that half of us would be awake at any time, and after so many days of this routine, we were suffering badly from sleep deprivation.
“The first night I awoke to find a Japanese soldier crouched beside me. I shot him as he cracked the fuse on a grenade. Then I went back to sleep listening to the cries of women and children nearby,” he said.
The second night, Dowdakin added, everybody awoke at once to find themselves under attack. Dowdakin opened fire and cut down a man who seemed to be struggling with smaller people. “Then I realized the man was killing his children with a knife,” he said. “A figure in a skirt leaped over the double concertina wire and kept running full tilt to the cliffs and leapt over. There was another burst of fire from the BAR man next to me, and he hit a teenage boy squarely in the head. It was obviously a terrible mistake, but it was too late now to do anything about it.
“At dawn we sat eating our C-rations calmly,” he said, “in the midst of what could truthfully be described as a slaughterhouse. Two women and several children sat among us. We gave them C rations, but they wouldn’t eat them. They drank all our water.”
MARINE SERGEANT GRANT TIMMERMAN was a tank commander in the 2nd Tank Battalion supporting the 6th Marines. During mop-up action the day after the gyokusai Timmerman was advancing with his tank ahead of an infantry unit, firing steadily until a series of enemy trenches and pillboxes halted him.
He noticed a likely target and immediately ordered the tank stopped. Aware of the danger from the muzzle blast from his 75-millimeter gun, Timmerman stood up in the exposed turret and ordered the infantry to hit the dirt.
At that moment a Japanese soldier threw a grenade that would have dropped through the open turret into the tank, doubtlessly killing or wounding all or most of the inhabitants. Timmerman blocked the opening with his body and held the grenade against his chest, taking the full force of the explosion. His Medal of Honor action saved the rest of his crew, but he willingly sacrificed his own life in the process.
Another Marine, Private First Class Harold C. Agerholm of the 4th Battalion, 10th Marines, made repeated trips through a highly dangerous area in a Jeep converted into an ambulance to evacuate about forty-five seriously wounded men before a hidden Japanese rifleman shot him to death.
SOME QUESTIONS STILL REMAIN unanswered almost three-quarters of a century later. One of them is a report that a Marine artillery unit—the 3rd Battalion, 10th Marines—repulsed an attack by Japanese forces at the height of the gyokusai by firing its artillery at point-blank range, decimating the enemy and thus sparing many American lives.
As war correspondent Robert Sherrod, writing for Time magazine in the 19 July 1944 issue, phrased it: “The artillerymen fired point-blank into the Japs with fuses set at four-tenths of a second. They bounced their high explosive shells 50 yards in front of the guns and into the maniacal ranks.… When the order came to withdraw, they sent this answer back, ‘Sir, we would prefer to stay and fight it out.’ They did.”
Not according to General George Griner, commander of the 27th Infantry. In a September 28 letter addressed to the editor of Time, he said the Marine artillery battalion did not stop the attack. It fought very courageously and suffered 136 casualties, but it was likewise overrun. The number of enemy dead found at its position was 322.
Captain Edmund Love of the 27th Infantry had this to say: “It is doubtful that the Marines ever fired a round from any one of their artillery pieces during that morning. Men of the 1st and 2nd Battalions, 105th Infantry, who were in front of those guns are adamant in their statement that no rounds were fired. Officers of this battalion later investigated the sites of the two batteries nearest them. They testified that the ammunition was piled neatly and the only used brass was also stacked in neat piles. Not a round had been fired since the registration of the night before.”
After a brief and gallant fight at close range in which these Marines killed 322 enemy soldiers at a cost of 136 killed and wounded, the positions were overrun, according to Love. The brevity and surprise are attested by the fact that the guns captured by the enemy and recaptured later by the 106th Infantry Regiment were found intact without even one single breechblock removed.
THE FACTS, AS FAR AS “Howlin’ Mad” Smith was concerned, were simple enough. He reported to Admiral Spruance that the Japanese banzai attack—unquestionably the largest of its kind in the Pacific War—had included only “300 enemy supported by two or three tanks.”
It stretches the imagination consid
erably that the same military commander who traveled the front lines on the afternoon of 6 July, warning people about the strong possibilities of a banzai attack, could now write it off as consisting of only three hundred men. (By 1948, when his book, Coral and Brass, was released, Smith had reexamined the incident and come up with a more realistic figure of fifteen hundred to three thousand Japanese attackers.)
General Griner immediately protested Smith’s report and ordered a careful count of the bodies. What he found were 4,311 Japanese corpses. Fully aware that Smith would claim that a large percentage of the dead had died of wounds suffered earlier in the campaign, Griner cited figures given in the tried-and-true Army field manual.
“I viewed personally upwards of one thousand enemy bodies,” Griner said, “and nowhere did I find marked decomposition of bodies which would indicate that the enemy had been dead for more than thirty-six to forty-eight hours. I call your attention to the Army field manual on military sanitation and hygiene which states, ‘At temperatures of 85 degrees Fahrenheit, maggots will begin forming on bodies in approximately forty-eight hours.’ There were no maggots on these bodies when I viewed them.”
There is no way to ascertain exactly how many Japanese were involved in the banzai attack. That is precisely the reason the estimate of fifteen hundred to three thousand is most often used.
Although this figure is not specific, it serves to correct the first early report that the total was 300 to 400. That erroneous figure as well as a larger one of 1,500 participants put forward by Japanese Major Yoshida are almost certainly wrong by at least several hundred—and possibly by 1,000 or more. American soldiers and Marines reported figures of 50, 75, 100, 150, and so on. This was in addition to a sector-by-sector count of enemy dead that revealed that 2,295 enemy soldiers were killed in the combat area of the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment as well as 2,016 in the combat area of the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 106th Infantry Regiment.
One mass-killing episode, related by Lieutenant Kenneth Hensley of G Company, 6th Marines, is an example. Hensley was in command of four amphibian tractors and twenty-four riflemen on 9 July, when the incident occurred.
“We closed to about a hundred yards from the fifty or sixty enemy on the reef, and motioned them to come to the boat,” he said, “but they motioned us away. One officer armed with a rifle and standing on a rock… aimed his rifle at the boat several times. We covered this officer with machine guns and closed with the LVTs to about fifty yards.
“The Jap officer fired at the leading boats, and a machine gun—apparently about a .50-caliber—opened fire on the boats, putting two holes completely through one LVT. Many of the enemy threw hand grenades from the reef and fired rifles at the leading boats. Immediately all boats opened fire with small arms and annihilated the fifty to sixty enemy on this section of the reef.”
In addition to their reef sweeping, Hensley’s men also cleared a pocket east of Tanapag village on 9 July. One hundred Japanese bodies were counted there.
On the night of 8 July and into the early morning hours, a large cadre of Japanese emerged from their hiding places, and the 165th Infantry Regiment killed approximately 75 in front of its positions. The next night 150 more were killed. The 6th Marines, meanwhile, reported killing “50 or more” enemy soldiers as they attempted to sneak through the lines.
When darkness arrived on 8 July, from positions overlooking the coastal flats the 23rd Marines observed large straggler groups of Japanese moving toward Marpi Point, and they brought their long-range machine guns and 75-millimeter guns to bear on them. When the carnage was over, the 23rd Marines had this to report: “Over 500 Japanese were killed.”
But it seems likely that the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, could claim to have racked up even more dead Japanese that day. They killed an estimated eight hundred enemy soldiers—more, in fact, than they had killed during the rest of the Saipan operation put together. As one company commander observed, “Hunting was exceptionally good.”
Exactly how many Japanese were killed during the climactic gyokusai attack and the mop-up that followed will likely never be determined.
EARLY ON 8 JULY the Marines of the 23rd Regiment started moving toward the caves that flanked the north coast near Karaberra Pass. Instead of giving the 27th Army Division the task of officially securing Saipan, Holland Smith had recalled his 2nd Division to the front, along with the 4th Division, to do what mopping up was necessary.
“I don’t think the Japs have much fight left in them,” Lieutenant James Leary remarked after a steep climb up the hill and a pause on a flat-rock outcropping.
“That’s just the way I like it,” said Private First Class Carl Matthews, Leary’s runner. “I’m plumb tired of fighting.” Matthews’s words were more drawn out than usual, even given his East Texas accent, but nobody seemed to notice. Matthews was having a hard time walking, much less talking. There was something wrong with him, but he couldn’t tell what it was. It seemed to have something to do with a siege of relentless shelling he had gone through. He continued to perform his duties, but he was aware of blacking out for several seconds at a time.
When it was time to move on again Matthews stood up first, leaning into the wind unsteadily. Leary also stood up, and a split-second later the rattle of a machine gun below them broke the silence. Matthews ducked instinctively just as he saw Leary fall.
From somewhere up above him he heard someone calling for a corpsman.
“It’s no use,” he yelled. “The lieutenant’s dead.”
JAPANESE ATTACKS STILL CAME without warning. The day after the gyokusai, when everything was supposed to be settling down, the enemy attempted to move men through Karaberra Pass in order to stage another assault. Warned early that the Japanese were coming, A Company of the 2nd Marine Division established a defensive line and waited for the charge. Sometimes, if the Japanese drank some saki before the assault, they’d try to make a run at the Americans. They did this time.
As the Japanese attacked, some of them yelled, “Babe Ruth no good!” “Roosevelt son of a bitch!” and “Japanese drink Marine blood!”
The Americans responded with, “Tojo eats shit!” and “Hirohito eats shit!”
Some Japanese made their way around a cliff and attacked from the sea. One young Marine, Oklahoma-born Private First Class Ralph Browner—who was only sixteen years old, five-foot-six, and 125 pounds—found himself on a lonely section of beach with the ocean about two yards to his left, a cliff five yards to his right, and the beach behind him, about twenty yards deep. Browner had a .30-caliber machine gun, his carbine, and several grenades. He heard the sound of dripping water behind him.
He turned to see three Japanese soldiers in loincloths emerging from the water brandishing knives. He shot each one squarely through the head. A fourth soldier appeared and lunged at him, and Browner put a bullet through his chest.
Firing the machine gun freehand, Browner pulled the pins on a couple of grenades and threw them with his other hand. When the fight was over he had killed approximately forty of the Japanese. He was awarded the Navy Cross.
THE CASE OF Private First Class Carl Matthews was extremely puzzling at first. But under repeated questioning by doctors and nurses, his problems were slowly uncovered. During a period of close-in shelling, a short round of artillery had fallen close to Matthews. “It did something to my head,” he recalled. “It was like my brain was bigger than my skull all of a sudden. My entire body felt like a giant firecracker had exploded and slammed against me.”
When that happened Matthews passed out completely. Observers said he simply sat down on the ground and didn’t move. Another soldier picked him up and took him to a regimental hospital. He was transferred to a hospital ship. But his memory was faulty, and his eardrum was busted. He didn’t remember anything for eight days. When he finally woke up he was in New Caledonia, and another patient heard him talking.
The soldier said, “Hey, Matthews, is that you?”
&
nbsp; It was Corpsman Winiford Moore of Dandridge, Tennessee—from Matthews’s unit. He had been blinded from a bullet wound in the head, but he knew Matthews by the sound of his voice. Matthews’s nerves were in such a state that he vomited all over the floor.
For a few months following that day Matthews moved in and out of unconsciousness. There were periods he could remember and periods when he could remember nothing. Blood vessels in his brain were ruptured, and the seepage of blood produced a condition similar to a stroke. It took many months for him to return to normal.
Each overloaded hospital ship had beds for 480 men, but the flood of wounded was such that patients were put on cots, sofas, and borrowed bunks of ship personnel—and still there was never enough space. Only about one man of every five wounded could be taken aboard hospital ships. The rest were forced to sweat it out on the crowded bunks of transport ships. Matthews was lucky: because of his strange and recurring illnesses, he rated a bed.
The types of wounds most men suffered were from artillery and mortars, which caused an estimated 65 percent of the wounds. Saipan had been an artillery fight, punctuated by brutal, close-in fighting and more and larger banzai wounds than veterans in the Pacific had ever experienced.
When men on hospital ships succumbed to their wounds, as many did, they were lowered over the side of the ship. Matthews saw eight or ten dead men buried at sea. They had weights tied to their feet so they’d go down in a hurry.
SERGEANT TOM TINSLEY’S Marine regiment had moved to the top of a hill and dug in for the night. The next morning they moved down the hill and relieved the Army units that were left from the banzai charge. It was a far from pleasant experience.
They had to move bodies in order to dig a foxhole that first night on the coastal plain, and for the next few days the stench of rotting flesh was almost unbearable. “The flies were so bad you couldn’t eat without them getting in your mouth,” remembered Tinsley. In this one small area there were 3,000 or more dead in a tract of ground that contained only a few acres. “It reminded me of Custer’s last stand,” he said. “I think there were 918 US military men killed or wounded in the area.”