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

by Bill Sloan

  At night Haberman and a buddy lay on their backs in their foxhole, holding Ka-Bar knives at their chests. They heard Japanese soldiers running everywhere. A few of them jumped over their foxhole, and they could hear the sound of other Marines fighting Japanese troops. “I was primed and ready,” said Haberman. “No Japs fell on me, but I can’t describe the fear I felt.” He and his buddy spent two nights there, without food or sleep, while shells and mortars exploded all around them.

  On the second or third day Haberman and a companion stumbled across two unmarked graves. During a short break in the fighting they ran into a group of native Chamorros.

  “We were curious, so we asked them about the two graves we’d seen,” Haberman said. “They told us that several years before Pearl Harbor a plane crashed off the coast of Saipan and the Japs went to the crash site and picked up a man and a woman pilot. They took them to the town of Garapan, where they were jailed and tried as spies from the United States. They were later executed and buried in the graves we’d discovered.”

  Both Haberman and his friend were intrigued by the story. They assumed that the bodies buried there might be the graves of the famous female flier Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, who disappeared on a round-the-world flight in 1937.

  But then the Marines were quickly caught up in a Japanese counterattack, and Haberman was soon fighting for his life. Every day he saw more of his buddies killed and wounded, but from time to time he still wondered about those graves.

  I WAS IN THE first wave on Saipan,” remembered Sergeant Joe Brown of the 2nd Marines, a Texan from Wichita Falls. “We ran into a little resistance there, but at first it wasn’t real bad. We moved in maybe three hundred yards, and then our platoon got isolated from our outfit, and there was hell to pay.”

  During that night on Saipan Brown and his comrades were stuck by themselves at the edge of a sugar cane field. There were about twenty or thirty cane marshes out there, and the Japs evidently slipped back from the beach to take cover in them.

  That night the Marines lost their platoon leader and his runner. In addition, another platoon sergeant was wounded and so was a platoon guide, and that left Brown with three squads. Ordinarily he was the squad leader of the second squad, but now he had two other squads to deal with. He moved back near the edge of the water and regrouped with the battalion. They spent that second night on the beach.

  Brown and his men caught quite a bit of artillery fire that night, and the next day they started their move up the island. By nightfall, after they had moved up quite a ways, Brown was wounded by shrapnel from a hand grenade. Some fragments penetrated his left side and left eye, but his injuries weren’t bad enough to get him shipped out. He would end up commanding that platoon all the way through the campaign.

  A short time later the Marines were pinned down by machine gunfire, and several of the men were hit. The captain came through and told Brown to take the stretcher cases back to company headquarters. As they started back across some rice paddies with the wounded, the Japs opened fire on them from the adjacent woods.

  They had to drop all the stretcher cases, and the Japanese killed every last one of them. Out of the whole group, Brown was the only one who had a rifle that would fire, so he’d crawl a little ways and then raise up and shoot. One of the walking wounded, Private First Class T. T. Moore, a platoon guide from Dallas, managed to get back to the company and tell them what was happening. “Old Joe’s in trouble,” he said. “Who wants to volunteer with me and help him out?”

  When nobody volunteered, Moore returned. For a while he and Brown traded shots with the Japanese until they somehow managed to get back with what was left of the walking wounded.

  “Boy, that was a close one!” said Moore, squatted down on his knees and sighing. As he spoke, a Japanese machine gun opened fire from somewhere and hit him squarely in the back. Brown turned in time to see one of the bullets come out of Moore’s chest. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT was soft spoken, hardworking, and proud of his southern heritage. Four of his great-uncles had fought in the Civil War. Two of them had been killed in battle, and a third had lost a leg at Chickamauga. His father was a lieutenant in the Army field artillery in World War I, and his mother was a native of South Carolina.

  He grew up in Fort Worth and went to public schools there, and somewhere along the way he started thinking of becoming a writer. But suddenly there was a war on, and there were more important things to do. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, he was attending a small, scholarly college in Houston named Rice Institute, and he was six months away from finishing a reserve officer class that gave him a commission in the Marine Corps.

  “What I wanted was to see the fighting,” remembered Lieutenant John Graves. “If you’d grown up on tales of Rebel great-uncles and the Marines at Belleau Wood, you tended to feel that way.”

  After graduation Graves put in thirty weeks at Quantico. Then he was sent to Camp Pendleton, where the 4th Marine Division was about to be formed. His first big job was when he and a friend were given the task of turning about sixty or seventy college kids into artillerymen.

  “We knew quite a bit about artillery,” Graves said, “but we didn’t know that much about being officers. We kind of spoiled them, and we gave them a farewell beer bust when they graduated. They all got tipsy, and they were slapping us on the back and saying ‘Good old Ed, good old John,’ and so on. When we got out of that we sat down and smoked a cigarette and said, ‘Shit, we learned something.’”

  Graves became battery executive officer. That was a fancy-sounding name for the guy who gives fire commands to an artillery battery. In January 1944 the whole 4th Division moved out.

  “We trained like hell until that time,” Graves said, “and it was intense training, on those California hills out there, and practice landings at San Clemente.” After that they spent about forty days on an LST. They landed at Kwajalein. Graves’s battery had 75-millimeter pack howitzers, small cannons that broke down into pieces that could be loaded into amphibian tractors for getting over coral reefs that would stop regular landing boats.

  At one point, far out to sea, they hit such a bad storm that one of the tractors broke the chains holding it down, and it started slamming into other tractors, a couple of which were knocked loose. The officer in charge of the tractors was Lieutenant William Wilson, and he had guts enough to climb up to the overhead, dangling with his hands from cables and pipes, and shouted instructions to his people below, who finally got the mess tied down. After that they called Wilson “Willie the Ape” for the way he’d looked up there. “But it was admiration, more than anything else,” Graves said, “because we were really plenty grateful to him.”

  After Kwajalein Graves and the rest of the company returned to Hawaii for three or four months. Then they went to Saipan.

  “A whole bunch of the LVTs got smashed right away,” said Graves. “There were Japanese guns in the hills that were zeroed in on those things—so there was a shortage of them real quick.” Graves ran around trying to find some way to get in over the coral reef, but it was all along the landing beaches, so he couldn’t find anyplace. He finally found a channel going into a town called Charan Kanoa. It was a sugar refinery town that had been smashed by naval gunfire and planes by then, but a stone pier jutted out from it, so he got the coxswain to start in there.

  About that time a Jap gun started firing on them, and the first shot hit right behind them. Then the Japanese fired again, and this time it hit right in front of them. They had a good idea where the next one would hit. Graves turned and told the coxswain to turn around and get the hell out of there.

  The group finally found a place to land, but it was well north of the primary landing area. Graves knew he was going to have to go down south, where the main shooting was, to try to find his battalion, but he also knew that he couldn’t take all those people with him. Marching down that beach under fire was a tough job for anybody, so he l
ooked around to find someone who might be able to do it on his own. The first soldier he saw was a kid from the Midwest named Hallstein, who saw Graves looking at him and frowned.

  He said, “Aw shit, Lieutenant, not me!”

  Graves nodded. “Yes, you!”

  Hallstein and Graves took off, and the further south they got, they saw a lot more wrecked-out LVTs and bodies of dead Marines. They came suddenly to a clearing where there were four huge 105-millimeter batteries. “I don’t know how they managed to get those damned things across the reef,” Graves said. “But anyhow, they had them there, and the executive officer was in a foxhole giving fire commands.”

  Leaving Hallstein on the beach, Graves struggled up to the foxhole and was surprised to find himself face-to-face with Lieutenant Jack Armstrong, who had originally been in Graves’s battalion but was now serving as the 105th Battery’s executive officer.

  “Get down, man,” Armstrong said. “We’re still getting some pretty good shell fire.”

  Armstrong didn’t know where their outfit was, and he was very busy. Graves just slapped him on the shoulder, said, “Good luck,” and moved on.

  It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes after Graves saw him that the Japanese hit Armstrong’s ammo dump. He put everyone undercover, then went in and started carrying out the shells until one of them blew up on him. He got a Navy Cross—posthumously.

  AS SOON AS you land, plans don’t mean a thing,” remembered Private First Class Bob Verna of G Company, 4th Marines. “You have to react, and the adrenaline keeps you going.” Instead of being dropped at the O-1 line, Verna and other members of his company jumped out of the landing vehicle and tried to make it on their own. En route three-fourths of the company was wounded or killed.

  By the time darkness descended that first night the Marines were ashore, but they were far short of their goal. The Japanese still held half the territory that the Marines had expected to control by the end of the day, and their presence on the ridges above the beaches constituted a severe threat.

  Private First Class Jack Vigliatura of the 2nd Marines carried a BAR, which weighed more than twenty pounds when loaded. He would never forget the sheer terror of nonstop gunfire in battle. “You don’t know where they’re coming from or how many there are,” remembered the Worcester, Massachusetts, native. He admitted he was “scared shitless” but that he joined the Marines “to fight, not sit on my butt.”

  Private First Class Bob Talbot, from the East Texas town of Corsicana, felt the same way—up to a point. “I talked to the Army, Navy, and Marines before I joined up,” he recalled. “I liked what the Marines promised. They said, ‘You’ll be in combat in six months.’ The others said, ‘We can’t promise you that.’ But now, after Guadalcanal and Tarawa, I wasn’t so sure that was such a good idea anymore.”

  At Tarawa Talbot had saved four brutally wounded men by holding their heads above the water for six excruciating hours. “A Marine directly in front of me was hit in the face with a bullet,” he remembered. As the unconscious man began to sink, Bob grabbed him and pulled the belt-like life preserver up under the wounded man’s armpits, inflating the belt. The Marine was able to float with his head above water.

  Talbot started for the beach about four hundred yards away. Then he saw another Marine wounded nearby. He swam over to him, pulling the first Marine along. He removed the second Marine’s backpack, inflated the life belt, and slipped it under his arms. Once again he started for the beach.

  He had gone only a short distance when he saw a third Marine hit, and then a fourth. The men were falling like flies, but when Talbot turned toward the shore with the four Marines, a sense of helplessness rose in his chest. Trying to keep the four wounded Marines together in the current was like trying to push marbles up a hill.

  Talbot removed his belt and the belt of one of the Marines and managed to tie the men together in pairs. Then he saw a group of Higgins boats plucking wounded Marines out of the water. They came over and one by one picked up the four wounded men.

  Finally Bob turned again toward the beach. “I remember explosions, stumbling into underwater shell holes, and crawling over barbed wire,” he said, “but somehow I managed to reach the shore. Believe me, I talked to God a whole lot that night.”

  He also suffered an injured leg that gave him trouble later at Saipan and for years afterward. After he got ashore and found his outfit, he saw that his leg was covered with blood. He never found out what was wrong, and he stayed awake most of the night. He put morphine patches on the leg for three or four days, and a doctor finally X-rayed it, but there was no sign of any shrapnel or gunshot wound.

  Years later Talbot happened across a story about the young lieutenant who organized the rescue with the Higgins boats and how he had been awarded a Bronze Star for his actions that day. Bob wrote him a letter and soon received a reply from Lieutenant Eddie Heimberger, who by this time was an actor known by his stage name Eddie Albert.

  MANY TIMES THE Japanese aggressors came singly or in pairs, stepping silently and with one thing in mind—killing Marines. Private First Class Jim Monroe of Brownwood, Texas, who’d turned eighteen on the eve of the Saipan invasion, and another Marine shared a deep ditch, and they took turns keeping watch.

  “My buddy and I were doing this all night,” recalled Monroe, “and here is one of the things about the war that I’ll think about forever. We were less than three feet apart, and he took a bullet right through the head. I’ll always wonder, ‘Why him and not me?’”

  Despite the chaos, Lieutenant General Thomas E. Watson, commander of the 2nd Marines, came ashore and set up a command post in a captured ammunition dump. Not to be outdone, Lieutenant General Harry Schmidt, head of the 4th Division, also established a command post ashore, despite the fact that the division had given up part of the ridgeline in its area and fallen back to safer quarters to prevent a possible counterattack in the dark.

  Sure enough, at about 0330 a tank-led major attack hit the 6th Marines, overrunning a 60-millimeter mortar position. But as the tanks passed, they were struck in the rear by mortars, bazookas, machine guns, and grenades. A pair of young Marines, Privates First Class Charles D. Merritt and Herbert J. Hodges, fired repeatedly with bazookas at seven tanks, disabling them all.

  When the tank and infantry attacks started, the Marines called for help from the Navy. The battleship USS California fired at the base of the ridgeline to stop Japanese tanks from coming down, and a squadron of US medium tanks also rumbled onto the scene. The fighting was intense, but when the tank battle was over, the Japanese withdrew with heavy casualties.

  HIS NAME WAS Cunningham, and he was the leader of our group when we landed on Red Beach 1,” remembered Corporal Roy William Roush of F Company, 2nd Marines, a native of Alva, Oklahoma, who joined the service when he was seventeen years old. “I’ve forgotten his first name,” he said, “but I’ll never forget what he did that day when three tanks charged our lines.”

  Each of the group leaders, including Cunningham, was equipped with what they called an antitank grenade. It was about the size of a thick fountain pen that you could bolt onto the end of your rifle and then fire at a tank; it would become an antitank missile for maybe fifty feet or so.

  When one of the tanks got so close you could almost spit on it, Cunningham hit it in the tread. The tank was crippled. The Japanese quickly realized that there was no way they were going to get out of there. They tried to back out, but the tank just started to spin.

  Cunningham calmly fired another antitank grenade and hit the tank again, this time right below the turret. “Japanese tanks were what we considered just plain junk,” Roush said. “They were nowhere near the type of tank our Shermans were or even the light tanks we had before that.” Their protective metal wasn’t very thick at all, and Cunningham’s shot easily penetrated the tank and exploded. Several Japanese tried to exit the tank through the turret, but Cunningham leaped up on top of the tank and threw another grenade inside, de
stroying it and the whole crew. The remaining two Japanese tanks retreated as fast as possible toward the town of Garapan.

  About that time a large mortar barrage struck the area, lasting maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. No one could see anything for all the dust going up. For a minute Roush thought everyone had been killed. When the barrage lifted, he moved forward. The first person he saw was Cunningham. For knocking out that tank and the crew, Cunningham received a medal.

  Roush didn’t get much sleep that night because the Japanese kept moving down toward the Marines. All through the night they heard the sound of the Japanese trucks coming. Roush could hear where they stopped and turned their motors off. Then, about 0100, they decided to stage a banzai charge.

  “I wasn’t sure how many there were—probably at least two hundred—and they came right down the road toward our position,” Roush said. “Our machine guns were plenty busy for a while. We had a lot of machine guns along the road because we knew that’s where they would be coming from.

  “The second attack was about the same number, and right in the middle of that second charge a Navy ship fired a star shell and lit up the whole area for miles around. Every Jap was slaughtered,” said Roush. “Not a one of them got through. They later reported sixteen hundred Japanese bodies right out there in front of the Marines’ little platoon after it was over.”

  Roush walked on up to his foxhole position. There was Cunningham, lying next to where his foxhole had been. The one-man killer of tanks was lying on his back. He was covered with blood and looked like he was dead.

  Roush asked a sergeant sitting there, “Is that Cunningham?”