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

by Bill Sloan

  Privates First Class Samuel “Red” Spencer and Jack Wren were both from Michigan, and they joined the 2nd Marine Division at the same time. “We saw a movie about the Marines wearing their dress blues and thought we’d really look sharp in those blues when we joined up in September 1942,” remembered Spencer.

  Their first action was at Tarawa. “It was pretty rough,” remembered Wren. “I carried a wounded guy down to the beach, but he’d been shot in the head and was dead by the time I got there. Our colonel was a very good guy, but he died trying to get off the water.” In the space of a few hours there weren’t any officers left, and a sergeant was running everything.

  They ended up on separate boats at Saipan. “We were all over hell, trying to find each other, but at the end of the battle neither one of us could find the other one,” said Spencer. Both thought the other was dead.

  When Jack was located, he was in Garapan in street-to-street, house-to-house fighting. “You had to go one house at a time, room to room,” said Spencer. “You never knew where the Japs were. They were everywhere.”

  During the day Marines could move up close behind the tanks and walk, and the Japs stayed away because of the tanks. Instead, they waited until night and came in. “If they came during the day, we would stand still and knock them off,” Spencer said. “A guy in my outfit had a BAR, but he got hit and had to leave, and I took over the BAR. I knocked off a bunch of Japs. I told the other guys that I would shoot high and they would shoot low to make sure we got all of them. That was the only time I had a BAR, and I’m really glad I did.”

  A few days later Spencer was on the lower levels of Mount Tapotchau, the biggest mountain on Saipan, and it was a bad place to be. When Spencer and a group of Marines came out of the jungle into a clearing, he got hit in the back with shrapnel and was knocked out cold.

  When he woke he looked up to see the blue sky. It was strangely quiet, and the Marines around him were all dead, and he thought he was dead too. This must be what Heaven looks like, he thought. Then a big sergeant came through and kicked him with his boot. When Spencer turned to look at him, he heard him yell, “Hey, Red’s alive! Get over here!”

  Several men appeared and gave him morphine, and others carried him down to where he could be put on a Jeep. Next thing he knew he was on a ship. Boy, he thought, isn’t this nice!

  Wren didn’t find Spencer until he was back in Hawaii. “He came running over to where I was, and I heard him yelling, ‘Where’s Spencer? Where’s Spencer?’ I thought for all the world Jack was dead. Seeing him was quite a shock,” said Spencer.

  PRIVATE FIRST CLASS Wayne Terwilliger was remembering the day he joined the Marines. It seemed ages ago, but it had been less than a year. After high school he’d enrolled at Western Michigan University—it was a big baseball school, and he knew if he did okay there, it could mean a contract for him with a professional ball club.

  He played shortstop and was pretty good for a kid who only weighed 130 pounds. But that first semester was tough. He ended up with an A, a B, and a C. But there was an F in there too, and he went to talk to Dr. Russell Siebert, his history professor, about his grades, hoping against hope that there was a way to sidestep the F and keep playing baseball.

  “I’ll have to give it up,” he said. “Unless I can do something about this grade, they won’t let me play baseball anymore.”

  “I’m sorry, son,” Dr. Siebert said, “but that’s just the way things are. There’s nothing I can do.”

  Terwilliger was crestfallen, but he tried not to show it. “Hell, I’m going down to the Marine Corps,” he said. “I think those blue and white Marine uniforms are real pretty. I’ll see if they’ll let me join up.”

  “Well,” said Dr. Siebert, shrugging, “good luck in the Marines.”

  In lots of ways the Marines had been good luck. The train was crowded as they headed west for San Diego, and it was the first time he’d ever been out of the state of Michigan. He’d even enjoyed boot camp. He’d never shot a gun before, but he made “expert” as easy as pie. The DI was kind of an easygoing guy, and they got along fine. He was good at Morse code, so they assigned him to an amphibious tank. He still wasn’t sure why.

  Now the whole crew of the tank was huddled outside, with the tank itself a few yards away. Private First Class Billy Schrader spotted something moving on top of the tank. “Hey, listen,” he whispered. “A Jap’s out there, messing around the tank.” He raised his gun and fired. “I think I got him.”

  Several members of the crew crept out to check. The Jap was dead, with a bullet through the side of his head. He had a lot of ammo with him. He could’ve easily blown the tank to hell and back if Schrader hadn’t seen him.

  THE SECOND LIEUTENANT that was in charge of us said we’d ended up on the wrong beach, and we had to move down,” remembered Private First Class Bill L. Steel, a kid from Nashville with the 2nd Marines. “So he started moving us down this railroad track, with us hollering at him, ‘Get us off! Get us off! It’s too wide open out here!’

  “The lieutenant said, ‘Shut up! I know what I’m doing!’ and just about then the shells started falling, and I got hit.” A shell hit between his feet, and he went flying through the air. When he landed he was a little dazed, but he was still pretty mobile. He’d been wounded in the left ankle, left leg, and left hand, and he had sand and gravel in his nose, ears, and mouth. He got out of there and took cover under a tree, where he grabbed somebody’s machine gun and started firing.

  “When it was over there were forty-two of us in the platoon, and only nineteen of us were able to walk out,” Steel said. “The second day on Saipan I was evacuated out to a Merchant Marine ship, where they dug the shrapnel out of me and put me back ashore. On the fifth day I was back in the front lines on the side of Mount Tapotchau.”

  ONE OF THE most intriguing stories about the early days of the invasion involved the tall, brick smokestack of a sugarcane refinery in Charan Kanoa. Although the American naval barrage had gutted the town, many Marines believed the smokestack had been purposely spared as a visual guide for the incoming Amtracks. The smokestack looked like it had been pierced a thousand times, but it still stood.

  After a few days the Marines discovered that a Japanese hiding in the smokestack was directing artillery fire on US forces. As a forward observer, he had been looking down on them the whole time.

  Marines in the vicinity experienced destructive damage from Japanese mortars for about two and a half days until someone discovered the spotter. The smokestack and the spotter were quickly destroyed.

  FOR PRIVATES FIRST CLASS JACK GILBREATH and James V. Reed, both 4th Division Marines, the terrors of Saipan were almost a letdown, in a manner of speaking.

  Gilbreath, from tiny Mercury, Texas, and Reed, from Pine River, Minnesota, had already experienced a heart-stopping tragedy before even leaving Pearl Harbor—a raging, runaway fire in which 163 sailors and Marines had died and 396 were injured.

  By jumping into the water as flames and explosions rocked his LST (landing ship, tank), Gilbreath escaped with only a few minor burns, while dozens of others died a tragic death in one of the strangest and most bizarre disasters of the war. It happened in the West Loch area of Pearl Harbor, where twenty-nine LSTs were tied up, beam to beam, at six different piers.

  It happened on a Sunday. Half of their rifle companies had liberty, while the other half stayed aboard the LST. Gilbreath was up on deck, reading a book, when he heard an explosion down below. He wondered what it was. When a second explosion occurred, he knew he had to get off the ship—something was terribly wrong. He threw down the book, ran to the side of the LST, and jumped off. Soon a Higgins boat picked him up.

  “When the third explosion hit, the fire hadn’t gotten back to the main wheelhouse, where it was stocked with anti-aircraft ammunition. But when it blew, the ship just folded up like a big horseshoe and sank,” Gilbreath recalled. All the other LSTs were locked in at the same pier, and it was impossible for them to get
away from the fire, which covered everything in a matter of minutes, so they burned up too, along with all the Marines’ sea bags, rifles, and just about everything else.

  Gilbreath was taken to a hospital and checked all over, but he had only a few superficial burns. “The Navy did everything they could,” he said. “They pulled a lot of men out of the water, but many others drowned or were killed. Those who were rescued remained at Pearl Harbor for about a week, waiting for new LSTs from the States.”

  When Reed awakened in the early light of Sunday morning, it looked as though “the whole bloody world” was on fire aboard LST 143.

  “I’d taken my shower and crawled into bed because I’d had liberty the night before,” he recalled. “I hadn’t been asleep very long, not more than about twenty minutes, and when I opened my eyes all I could see was flames in every direction.”

  Reed was sleeping in an upper berth, and he jumped onto the floor, which was about eight feet down, hitting his leg as he did. “I don’t know what I hit, but my leg was so sore I could hardly move on it,” he said, “but I jumped in the water and started swimming.” He hadn’t gone far when a large sailor pulled him out. Sometime later Reed could hear the sound of explosions, and an ambulance came and outfitted him with some clothes—all he had on was shorts—and took him down to the docks. His leg was black and blue by then, and he was all torn up. But at least he was alive.

  A press blackout was enforced, and Navy personnel were ordered not to talk about the incident. The disaster was classified information until 1960. Even today it is still not well known.

  As it turned out, the Japanese on Saipan had some surprises up their sleeves—surprises that even took Gilbreath’s breath away.

  Reed was still hobbling around from his LST injury when he got to Saipan, so his CO told him he didn’t have to go in with the rest of the troops. In a few days, though, he went in anyway.

  “One of the most miserable things I saw on Saipan was one night when the Japanese had some civilians out in front of them, and they drove the women and children right into our front lines,” he said. “Naturally the Marines didn’t know anything about this, and they started firing and—oh, my God—they killed most of those women and children. One of the poor guys, he had a Browning automatic rifle, and he was the one who’d done a lot of the killing. When he could see what had happened, he committed suicide.

  “Then there was this little girl about four or five years old hiding in a cave,” Reed said. The Saipan children were dying of dehydration, but they wouldn’t touch the water unless one of the Marines tasted it first—the Japanese had told them that the Americans were going to kill them. “We had a big can that we poured the water out of, and this kid was reaching out with a cup she had when her mother came along. Just as the girl was holding out her cup, her mother jerked her away. I can still see the expression on that kid’s face. It was a little thing, I guess, but it made me feel kind of sick. I knew how thirsty she was.”

  A Japanese officer was also found hiding inside the cave, and an interpreter started talking to him, trying to get him to come out. Instead, the officer started shooting, and one of the bullets hit Reed in the back of the neck. He was transported to the hospital ship, the USS Solstice, and survived.

  IT WAS THE fourth or fifth day—Private First Class Ray Renfro wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept. “All I knew was that we went day and night with no sleep, and I lost count of the days,” Renfro remembered. “We ran out of water too.”

  None of the Marines knew where the Japanese were, but the Japanese seemed to know exactly where they were. They were constantly shooting at the Marines from holes in the ground.

  “We heard a shot, and the wind went right by my ear, and of course we all hit the dirt,” he said. “The longer I lay there, the madder I got. I took the safety off that old BAR and jumped up and ran right up to that hole in the ground, firing that thing as I went, spraying bullets everywhere when I got up there. But damn, I’d run completely out of ammunition, and I had to move fast and get out of the way.”

  Renfro got behind a tree to reload his BAR with twenty fresh rounds. Meanwhile a close friend of his, Private First Class Gerald Vandemere, ran up beside him.

  “If you’ll get a grenade ready,” Renfro said, “I’ll jump out and fire, and you pitch the grenade at ’em.”

  But something went wrong. As Vandemere jumped out and threw the grenade, the Japanese shot him right in the gut.

  “He was my foxhole buddy, and he didn’t make it,” Renfro said. “I sat there and listened to him groan for a long time before he died.” That wasn’t the end of it. Two more Marines ran up to where Renfro was standing behind the tree, and the Japs shot them both in the head. They hit the ground and didn’t move. Renfro never knew how the Japs missed him, but they did.

  “Finally, they got a half-track up there with a 75-millimeter cannon,” he said, “and he pulled up close and fired straight-on into that hole. That was the last we ever heard from those Japs.”

  WHEN PLATOON SERGEANT GEORGE GRAY began feeling homesick, sometimes he’d close his eyes and remember the time when he and his whole 4th Marine Division company were making a name for themselves on the silver screen. They’d been training at Oceanside, California, when a movie crew descended upon them and started filming Guadalcanal Diary, based on the best-selling book by Richard Tregaskis. Gray’s whole company was invited to participate.

  “We spent the better part of six weeks surrounded by movie stars,” remembered Gray, a young man from Arkansas who was an Amtrack driver. The actors were playing the roles of Marines carrying out the landing at Guadalcanal, but it got scary when they started using live ammunition in some of the scenes.

  “Part of the time they were using sharpshooters,” said Gray. “If they wanted to really emphasize a scene, those sharpshooters would fire from up above. They’d start kicking up the sand pretty close to you. They were really good at what they did. We had a lot of fun, and nobody got hurt.”

  William Bendix, Preston Foster, Lloyd Nolan, and Anthony Quinn were among the stars. But the six weeks passed all too quickly. Then it was back to the real-life 4th Amphibian Tractor Battalion, and Gray and the other Marines went straight into action.

  “There was one driver—that was me—and two crewmen,” Gray said. “The LST had three machine guns, one .50-caliber and two .30s, and they got a real workout. Our first stop was Roi-Namur in the Marshall Islands, then we went to Kwajalein Atoll. We landed with the assault troops, and this time the bullets were for real. I carried a .45 and one of those small M-1 carbines. Our standard payload was twenty fully equipped Marines. If the Marines needed ammunition, we brought it in, and it was the real stuff.

  “We took a platoon of Marines down about forty miles and checked out all the islands there,” Gray recalled. “We’d move from island to island, checking to see if there were any Japanese on it. If there were, we’d let ’em have it. We were in and around Kwajalein for about fifteen days. Then we went back to Maui, Hawaii, and got new supplies, and then we were off again.”

  This time the target was Saipan. “My God, it was terrible,” Gray remembered. “There were lots of casualties, lots of losses, and the beach got so cluttered with tractors and boats in just a little while that there was hardly anyplace to land. We captured a Japanese major who said they never expected us to even get ashore. And if it hadn’t been for the tractors, he would’ve been right.”

  He made four landings that day, and every time it was just artillery and mortars—“just like rain coming in,” Gray remembered. “And when we got enough people ashore, we started hauling supplies in and taking wounded Marines out to the hospital ships.

  “When the beach was cleared, we buried close to twelve thousand bodies ourselves, and those caves they were sealing up, there’s no telling how many bodies they held.”

  The landing on Saipan had been a costly one on both sides. But there would be many more dead bodies to come.

/>   chapter 4

  Enter the 27th Division

  TO CAPTAIN EDMUND G. LOVE, who would go on to spend a large portion of his life writing about the exploits of his unit, the Army’s 27th Infantry Division became his life and the center of his universe. His comrades in arms took the places of his family. He talked with hundreds of infantrymen. In many cases he watched them suffer and die. And when he asked them what it all meant, most of them talked of one vast overwhelming desire—not to let their comrades down.

  “There seemed to me to be no more compelling force than this one thing,” Love wrote. “Comradeship.”

  THE 27TH INFANTRY DIVISION was a National Guard unit from the “Apple Knocker” country of upstate New York when it was called into federal service by President Franklin Roosevelt in October 1940. A lot of the men were soldiers with Italian, Irish, Jewish, Polish, and Russian names. Many were the sons of European immigrants. They came from Troy, Amsterdam, Saratoga Springs, Cohoes, Cobleskill, Cooperstown, New Baltimore, and Lake George. But they all got along just fine.

  “It was like a family gathering. Everyone was congenial—we had a lot of fun,” said Sergeant Nicholas Grinaldo of C Company, 105th Infantry Regiment. “We drilled about once a month, then we went to camp. We did maneuvers in the field. The night before we left, one of the guys went to a ‘house of ill repute’ in Troy. He picked up a dose of crabs, and he spread it through the whole First Battalion because we shared latrines. But they were all good guys.”

  By the end of its wartime tour of duty almost five years later, it had lost much of its local character. Men from every state in the union ended up serving in its ranks.

  On 15 October 1940, the entire division was put on a train to Fort McClellan in the Deep South state of Alabama. There were high points along the way, like the time General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the US Army, put in an appearance at Fort McClellan to conduct an inspection tour of the 27th Division. But there were plenty of “downers” sandwiched in between.