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

by Bill Sloan

  “We had our sidearms and four mounted machine guns,” Fulbright remembered. “The sides of the tractor were of heavy metal to ward off shells when possible. We would haul food, ammunition, men, or whatever was needed. We just did whatever job they had for us.”

  Bodies of dead and wounded Marines were floating around them, and several of the amphibs had been sunk. Among the corpses Fulbright could see Marines fighting desperately to stay alive.

  They had gone only a short distance when something strange happened to the Tornado. The amphib started spinning around and around. It wouldn’t go straight no matter what they did. The three crewmen soon realized they had a real problem. They might have picked up metal from a shell and stripped a track, but they absolutely could not go straight. Soon they started drifting out to sea.

  They floated helplessly on out through the armada of ships. They were waving frantically, but no one saw them. “We had a distress flag up, but there was so much going on that nobody noticed,” Fulbright said. “Everyone was concentrating on the job of securing the beachhead.”

  They knew their situation was desperate. Soon the ships were almost out of their sight. The roar of the guns grew fainter and fainter.

  “We had some food and water,” Fulbright recalled, “but that wasn’t our biggest worry. We were afraid the Japs would get us. We knew what would happen if the enemy captured us.”

  That night Brown fell overboard. He’d gone to the front of the Tornado to relieve himself, and the waves bounced him into the sea. Fulbright grabbed a long pole called a fishhook and hauled him back onboard. “It was pitch dark, and the waves were high,” said Fulbright, “but he managed to catch hold of the pole. It was a miracle.”

  About 1000 the next morning they were about twenty miles out to sea when the three men looked up to see a small fighter plane fly over. After a while an LCM (landing craft/mobile), capable of carrying up to fifty men, came alongside.

  When the LCM crew said they could take the men but not the amphib, the crew took the bolts out of the machine guns and threw them into the ocean. “We didn’t want the Japs to get them,” said Brown. “We didn’t want them to be able to use any part of our Texas Tornado.”

  When the three boys from Texas got back to where they were supposed to be, they were told that one amphib in their group had lost every member of its crew, though the vehicle was still seaworthy.

  “We replaced them,” said Dale, “and this tractor became the Texas Tornado Number Two.”

  THE 4TH MARINES’ landing at the Blue and Yellow Beaches went a little smoother than the landing of the 2nd Division. On Blue Beach 2 and Yellow Beach 1 many of the LVTs were able to reach shore and drop Marines at hundred-yard intervals.

  Not so lucky were the Marines on Yellow Beach 2, where heavy Japanese fire forced many of the men to jump into shallow water and run for cover. Of all the 4th Marines beaches, Yellow 2 was the most difficult, with heavy resistance that lasted all morning. As the LVTs moved inland, enemy artillery zeroed in on them, and counterattacks developed along their right flank.

  On Blue 2 and Yellow 1 most of the LVTs made it to shore and were able to deposit Marines beginning at about a hundred yards and extending to about seven hundred yards inland. On Yellow 2 heavy Japanese fire forced some Marines out of their vehicles in shallow water, where they had to run for their lives to find cover.

  The 4th Division’s plans called for the LVTs driving all the way to the objective, known as the O-1 line, about twelve hundred yards inland. That would put them on the slopes of Mount Fina Susu, which towered approximately three hundred feet high, but not many of the vehicles made it that far. In some spots a heavy undergrowth of vegetation stopped the Amtracks, and their inability to cover the ground set an unfortunate pattern—with the Marines falling short of their objectives as the battle wore on.

  After a full hour’s fighting, the 1st Battalion, 25th Marines, had succeeded in pushing just twelve yards in from the beach, and the 2nd Battalion’s progress was only slightly better. Despite all the would-be amphibious help, the infantry was still pretty much on its own. Marines tried to find cover as artillery shells exploded around them, and Japanese snipers picked them off before they could get away from the tractors.

  “There were dead Marines all around us,” remembered Corporal Joe Ojeda of the 4th Marines. “There were bodies and body parts all over, with everyone yelling for a corpsman.” Many Marines who survived a first wound were struck again by enemy artillery and mortar fire as they lay helpless behind wrecked vehicles awaiting transportation back to safety.

  THE “O-1 LINE” was the exact spot—twelve hundred yards into Saipan—that each unit of Marines was supposed to hold secure at the close of the first day. It was also where the driver of each Amtrack was supposed to pause long enough to let the Marines he was carrying get off and take up their positions. The first wave that day was supposed to be a squadron of Army amphibious tanks, and the second wave was the Marines. It didn’t happen that way.

  “They showed us the map, and we started getting information on how we would set up, where we were supposed to go, and so on and so forth,” said Private Arthur Liberty, who dropped out of Richmond High School in Vermont to join the Marines. “Our Amtracks were supposed to travel all the way to the O-1 line, but as soon as we hit the beach, the driver said, ‘Get Out!’”

  “What the hell do you mean?” a bunch of guys started to yell. “You’re supposed to take us to the O-1 line.”

  “Those goddamn tanks refuse to move because they’re drawing artillery fire from the Japs,” the driver said. “They stopped right on the beach instead of going where they were supposed to go. So goddamnit, get out!”

  They got out and started moving inland, but the next thing they knew, a Japanese soldier came charging at them. One Marine emptied all fifteen rounds from his carbine, but he kept coming. The bugler carried a shotgun with double-ought buck, and somebody yelled, “Shoot him, shoot him!” He hit the soldier twice before he dropped him.

  The unit moved in about five hundred yards, and Liberty and the others started attracting artillery shells. “They told us to move back, but as soon as we started, we could hear the artillery shells coming, so we hit the deck,” Liberty said. The shells landed right behind the Marines, and they jumped up and ran until they were chased all the way back to where they’d come from.

  That was as close as anyone got to the O-1 line. The whole unit ended up hugging the beach that night.

  EARLY IN 1942 two brothers had set aside attractive law practices in the South Louisiana town of Houma to join the Marines, and now, as luck would have it, Lieutenants Claude and Stanwood Duval were both huddled in the same landing craft headed for shore on Saipan.

  “I will never forget my first sight of Saipan—this huge, black island rising out of the mist, with battleships, cruisers, and destroyers everywhere,” recalled Claude, who was twenty-eight at the time. “Artillery shells were exploding in the water around us, and .50-caliber machine gun bullets were whizzing over us, and to make matters worse, the tractor was hitting the coral reef, and we were bouncing straight up in the air, not knowing whether the bouncing was caused by an artillery shell or the coral reef. Nevertheless, we got ashore and went inland with the tractor pretty close to a little narrow-gauge railroad that carried sugar cane. This reminded me of home in South Louisiana.”

  The men were under heavy artillery and mortar fire, and there was considerable light arms fire from the pier jutting out from the little village called Charan Kanoa. “We made it ashore, and the heavy fire continued,” said Claude. “The plan was that we would ride in the tractors up to the O-1 line. There was just no way this could be done, as tanks started down this one road, and they were immediately knocked out.”

  When the men got closer to the narrow-gauge railroad, the artillery fire and mortar fire were intense, and the Japanese seemed to be zeroing in on the Marines’ tractors. “So out of the tractors we piled and ran along the railroad tracks,
” Claude said. He tried to dig his first foxhole but could never really get started. He ended up digging about five quick, small foxholes as he moved from spot to spot.

  There were Japs in the trees and in holes in the ground who were using small arms to give the Marines a lot of problems. But worse yet, there was Japanese heavy artillery fire that chewed up masses of Americans. Carrier-based US planes firing rockets, dropping bombs, and strafing provided some quick relief, but as soon as the planes were gone, the artillery would open up again.

  “There was great difficulty in locating where the enemy was,” Stanwood said. “The artillery fire was coming from over the ridge on the other side of Mount Fina Susu, a hill that jutted up several hundred feet. At least that’s where I think it was coming from. To make a long story short, we didn’t ride to the O-1 line. In fact, we didn’t get there at all—not for two or three days.”

  AT SAIPAN THEY had a reef that seemed like it was about a mile wide, and those Japs zeroed in on that reef,” remembered Private First Class Robert Groves, a member of the 2nd Marine Division and a native of Fort Towson in Choctaw County, Oklahoma. He was sixteen when he arrived at Guadalcanal and had turned seventeen while he was there. He served as a machine gunner on an LVT.

  The LVT his outfit was in got hit hard. They were just about halfway across the reef when a Japanese shell hit them. Groves was exposed from the waist up, and he got hit by shrapnel in the shoulder going in, but it wasn’t enough to get evacuated. A corpsman put a Band-Aid on it, and Groves just went on about his business.

  Some of the other men in the boat were not so lucky. “When we made it to shore, we attacked across this little narrow-gauge railroad,” Groves remembered, “and one of the mortar shells hit right behind us and just decapitated our flamethrower man. Blew him all to pieces.”

  The Marines got about five hundred yards off the beach with a cane field out in front of them. “All of a sudden here come these Japs with these three little light tanks,” Groves said. “We pelted them with hand grenades, and they just bounced off the tanks, but when they got within about ten feet of us our bazooka man opened up on them and knocked all three of them out. A Jap pulled one of the hatches open, and about a half-dozen guys shot him when he stuck his head out.

  “As it turned out, that was the last Jap I ever saw,” said Groves. “I tried to get up, and I couldn’t walk.” Groves looked down. His right leg was covered in blood. His shoe was full of blood too, and he realized he had no feeling in his right leg at all. “I didn’t even know I’d been wounded,” he said.

  A corpsman threw Groves down to the ground and cut his right britches leg off. “You’ve got a bad wound,” the corpsman said, “but you’re not going to lose your leg.” Blood from the wound sprayed a foot or two high until he got it under control.

  “He gave me a shot of morphine, and that ended the war for me,” Groves said. “I could see these tracers going back and forth while I was lying on that stretcher, and I didn’t really care. Morphine does that to you.”

  PRIVATE FIRST CLASS RAYMOND RENFRO was born in Atoka, Oklahoma, and when he was a small boy his parents moved to Denison, Texas. He finished high school in Denison, and one day in November 1942 he drove to the recruiting office in Wichita Falls and did what many other eighteen-year-old American boys were doing—he signed up to join the Marines.

  “I was mad as hell at the Japanese,” he remembered, “and I wanted to do everything I could possibly do to rectify what they’d done to my country!”

  But Ray Renfro also had another axe to grind. His brother, Robert Leon Renfro, who was four years older, had joined the Army Air Corps in 1938 and been sent to the Philippines. He was stationed at Clark Field, where he had been told that there might be a flying job open. But the Japanese attacked and burned to the ground General Douglas MacArthur’s flock of B-17s on Monday, 8 December 1941, so that idea was out the window.

  Robert was originally scheduled to go to Australia with MacArthur, but he got left behind—along with a lot of others. “My mother and my aunt were crying and listening to the radio for all the news that was available,” said Ray, “and they probably would have been horrified if they’d heard the real news.” His parents eventually learned that with no room for these troops in MacArthur’s plans, Robert had joined a group that had somehow managed to get an inner-island boat and had planned to sail from the Philippines to Australia on it.

  The group started out, and they would hide in the daytime and only sail at night. According to Ray, Robert and his comrades had either anchored or abandoned the boat for a while when the Japanese sank it. They formed a guerrilla squad, and Robert did his fighting in the backwoods of the Philippines until he was spotted by a Japanese patrol boat and captured around the first part of April 1942.

  Ray didn’t know at the time he joined the Marines what had happened to Robert—not even whether he was dead or alive. “I watched my mother turn from a beautiful, brunette woman into a gray-headed lady,” he said. “I went to the Marine Corps in November, and that’s when I joined up. I went to Dallas, where we were given physicals and sworn in, and then we headed to California by train, but I had to admit that those first few weeks in boot camp I got to wondering if I’d made the right choice.”

  Boot camp was rough, but he’d known it would be. Renfro was a country kid who’d never been to the dentist. They found three or four cavities in his jaw teeth and sent him to a Navy dentist. “They enjoyed pleasure drilling in my mouth without any deadening,” he remembers, “and my mouth got so hot, it started to smoke!”

  When he got off the train at San Diego everyone made fun of the new recruits, saying, “You’ll be sorr-rry!”

  With his teeth all fixed, he was assigned to the 4th Marines, which was just forming up. “I made ‘Expert’ on the rifle range, and that was five dollars more in my paycheck every month,” Ray said. “I got the feeling I was doing all right.”

  Now, at Saipan, he was in a rifle platoon with the 4th Marine Division, carrying a Browning automatic rifle (BAR) and riding in an LVT. When the order came to go in they started to move, with a battleship belching those sixteen-inch guns all around them and smoke and fire everywhere. The Japanese were shelling the beach, and they hit a few of the LVTs.

  “Some of my friends didn’t ever make it ashore,” Ray said. “Some of them turned over. Hit that reef and just flipped over. But the one I was on made it in okay.” Marines jumped over the side to get out while the Japanese shelled all around them. It was about a hundred yards to the beach, so all of them jumped up and started running.

  Ray got knocked down by a mortar shell hitting the ground close to him, but it didn’t really hurt him at all. He just jumped up and ran on. There wasn’t anything else to do. They got up to the railroad track, and somebody said, “Dig you a foxhole.” So he did. All during the night he could hear the Japanese on the other side of the railroad hollering at the Marines: “You want to give up, Ma-lines? You want to give up?”

  Renfro wasn’t saying anything. He tried not to make any noise at all because he’d give away his position. But during the night a Japanese snuck over and jumped in the foxhole with a friend who was maybe a hundred feet to his left, and he tried his best to cut the soldier’s legs off with a machete. In the scramble that followed, another Marine tried to shoot the Jap, but he missed and hit his friend in the leg. They finally killed the Jap, but the soldier lay there all night with his legs bleeding. He somehow managed to live through it.

  ONE OF THE most terrifying mistakes during the invasion of Saipan happened when a landing craft loaded with Marines came within a hundred yards of invading the island of Tinian. The two islands are only a little over three miles apart, and in the wee hours of the morning they looked just alike—but the real “invasion” was almost a month too early.

  “We were told to circle, not to go in yet,” remembered Corporal Frank M. “Tommy” Thompson, a native of Indianapolis and member of the Marines’ V Amphibious Corps. “We circled for a
lmost eight hours, and some of the guys were getting seasick from all that circling.”

  Other Marines had taken off their boots and were dangling their feet in the water just to have something to do. The rest of them were packed in like sardines. They kept circling until the coxswains started worrying about running out of fuel. It was the third night of the Saipan invasion, after more than a dozen previous landing waves.

  “It was about two o’clock, I guess,” Thompson said, “and pitch-black, mind you, and everybody by now was falling asleep from sheer inertia. You’d just get to the point where you’d just fall asleep on one another. The officers were even asleep. And all at once a guy woke up and saw that we were close enough to see the silhouette of the trees on shore, but there were no fireworks going on.” All the fireworks were behind them.

  “Captain,” Thompson said uneasily, “things don’t look right here!”

  “What the hell do you mean?” the captain said.

  “Look, here’s where all the fireworks are going off,” he said, pointing to the rear. “But over here there’s nothing!”

  “Jesus Christ,” somebody said, “we’re about to land on the wrong island.”

  The captain got out his maps and turned his light on real low. “Oh my God,” he said, “Turn around! Turn around!”

  “I never heard four engines gunning up so fast to get the hell out of there,” Thompson said. “We were within a hundred yards of Tinian.”

  No one was ready to invade Tinian. That would come later. Right now the Marines had all they could handle on the beach at Saipan.

  chapter 3

  The Eternal Beach

  I REALLY DON’T have any idea how many Japs I killed between June 15 and 16, but it was one helluva lot,” remembered Sergeant Harold Haberman, an ammunitions runner for the 2nd Marines special weapons company. “They told everybody to dig in,” Haberman said, “and let the Japs come to us, and that’s what we did.” Haberman had a bazooka, and he started firing at the Japanese. He didn’t stop until he’d killed everything in sight.