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

by Bill Sloan

  “We marched through the streets of Aniston, Alabama, to go to Fort McClellan, and they were up on the rooftops and out of the windows throwing bricks at us,” Grinaldo remembered. “They yelled, ‘Yankee, go home!’ When we first got there we slept in pup tents. They had no quarters for us. We were killing rattlesnakes and copperheads, and a bunch of the guys got bitten by them.”

  AFTER QUITTING SCHOOL in the eighth grade and finding little work to do, Private First Class Frank Pusatere joined the 27th Division and became a member of D Company of the 105th Regiment. “When I heard someone say what a beautiful place Alabama was, I was all for it,” he remembered. “But when I was done with it, one word more or less described it for me: lousy!

  “It started out by wallowing through Tennessee’s red clay,” he said, “and ended up in the loblolly of Louisiana, which was infinitely worse.”

  The southerners were awfully stiff with the boys from up north in the beginning, but the men from the 27th would’ve taken anything their southern counterparts could give and been happy about it if they’d known what the Japs had in store for them.

  WE WENT TO ALABAMA, and they were still fighting the Civil War there,” recalled Lieutenant Joseph Meighan, who was in charge of a mortar platoon of M Company, 3rd Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment. “There was a ‘Mister B’ on the radio. He had a drawl as thick as syrup, and he did not like these ‘Damnyankees’ from up north. When we had leave there was a little city in Georgia called Mineral Wells, and all the fellows who were looking for action got it, but then they gave it a nickname: ‘Venereal Wells.’

  “Maneuvers were like going hunting for two or three days. That’s all it was,” said Meighan. “You had a blue team and a red team, and you’re trying to eliminate the other guys. We weren’t allowed to go into the cities. You were told not to make friends with the families. The funny thing is, every time we’d go on a drill or a twenty-mile hike, there was a farmhouse and a beautiful girl, built like Venus, and every time a group would march by, she had a well and was pumping water and showing her ass, and we called her Venus at the Pump. And we were told by our leaders to ‘Look straight ahead! Eyes left!’”

  SAMUEL DINOVA DROPPED out of school in Troy after the eighth grade, and when he was unable to find a job he joined a Civilian Conservation Corps camp to keep body and soul together.

  “I just didn’t think there was going to be any war,” Dinova recalled, “but a lot of my friends were joining the Army for a year, and I decided I’d give it a try, so I enlisted. It paid $18 a month, which was a good bit of money, so I joined up and went with the National Guard guys down to Alabama. We were the Blue Army, and we fought the Red Army, which was made up of guys in the 36th Infantry Division from Texas.

  “We’d fight all week and then get a pass to go into Greenville, Mississippi, or someplace like that. The maneuvers lasted till the end of September of ’41, and then we went back to New York. My enlistment was up at that time, and I still didn’t think there was gonna be any war.

  “It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was coming out of the Lincoln Theatre in Troy when I heard that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor,” Dinova said. “It wasn’t long before I got a notice to report back to active duty. That’s how I ended up with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.”

  “I only had one more week to go, and then I’d be a free man because my year in the 27th Division’s 105th Regiment would officially be up,” recalled Private First Class Robert Covell of Saratoga Springs. “I was just back from Fort McClellan, and oh, how I was looking forward to getting out of uniform and relaxing.”

  Then his sergeant came rushing in and told everybody that the Japs had just bombed Pearl Harbor. Covell shook his head and shrugged, “Well, I guess I won’t be going home any time soon.”

  “I was right,” Covell remembered. “We stayed for about a week in New York. Then we loaded up and shipped out to Hawaii—and the next time we moved you could hear the bullets hitting.”

  MOST MANEUVERS INVOLVED one factor—walking. “When we were the Blue Army against the Red Army, it seemed like all we did was walk,” Nick Grinaldo recalled. “As far as tactics were concerned, I guess the upper brass knew what the hell they were doing, but to me it was nothing but walking all the time.”

  After Fort McClellan—and the bombing of Pearl Harbor—the 27th moved to northern Alabama to guard the Wilson Dam. They were there about two weeks, then they moved back to Fort McClellan. “We stayed there for three or four days,” said Grinaldo, “then we boarded trains for Fort Ord, California, filled up with more replacements and got all new equipment. Then the next thing we knew, we were on board the HMS Aquitania, sister ship of the Lusitania [whose sinking by a German submarine pushed the US closer to war in 1915] and bound for Hawaii.” The 27th became the first division to be declared “combat ready” and to leave the continental United States for overseas. Before it returned, its soldiers would fight at Makin, Eniwetok, Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa.

  “You’re not told a thing except to get aboard ship,” Meigan recalled. “Then after few days at sea you were told your destination. They break out the maps, and you try to familiarize yourself with where you’re going. While you’re on the ship it seems like you’ll never get there. The ships are zig-zagging, there is naval protection in the form of submarines, but for entertainment there’s nothing to do but read. Like a fool, I got on the bow of the ship and watched the little flying fish playing in the bow wake, jumping out of the water. At night you could sleep on deck for the fresh air—most everyone did. I lost my foot locker at sea when the rope line between ships broke—all my stuff went to the bottom. I think later on I got a check for fifty bucks.”

  Along the way Grinaldo was promoted from corporal to buck sergeant, then from buck sergeant to staff sergeant. “Finally I made platoon guide,” he said. “I was second in command of the platoon if something happened to the platoon leader.”

  Grinaldo was temporarily assigned to the 165th Regimental Combat Team that hit Makin and Eniwetok, and he learned a lot: “Rule number one: don’t touch anything you don’t have to because of booby traps, and don’t get foolish and try to win the war by yourself because you can’t do it. It’s got to be a group effort.”

  After that, they returned to Hawaii, but there was no time to rest. “Get ready to move out,” they were told when the time came. A few days later they were headed to Saipan.

  PRIVATE JOHN EARLY of the 27th Division’s 165th Infantry Regiment remembers listening to the ship’s public address system off the coast of Saipan in the early morning of 16 June to stay informed about the Marines’ progress. Everything looked good at first.

  “They kept telling us that all was well, and nobody expected us to land,” Early recalled. “Then all hell broke loose, horns blasting, and the soldiers were ordered to their landing stations. The result was mass confusion.”

  A rumor spread like wildfire as Early climbed down to his assault boat. It said that the Marines were being pushed back and might lose the beachhead, that they were being hit hard from the rear. But instead of heading toward the beaches, the boats started circling and circling again and again—and it went on for hours. “I don’t believe any of us thought we could survive this night,” Early said. “Everyone was exhausted long before we hit the beach.”

  The arrival of the 27th Division on Saipan was definitely not a study in close-order drill. By the time most of the men were loaded onto boats, it was already totally dark. The first troops to reach the beach were from the 2nd Battalion of the 165th Infantry Regiment. They arrived in a hopelessly separated and uncoordinated mass of boats that landed all the way from the Green Beaches on the north to the Yellow Beaches on the south—instead of the Blue Beaches where they should have been.

  In most cases the coxswains, finally tired of circling aimlessly, drove their boats up to the reef and ordered the troops into the water—even though it was neck deep in some places.

  Scores of dead Marines lay on the beach in th
e half-light of the flares and exploding shells. Early and a close friend, Private Arthur Conlon, jumped into a large shell hole, and both fell asleep from exhaustion. They woke up shortly after daylight to find that two dead Marines were occupying the hole with them.

  PRIVATE CLIFFORD HOWE of Havre, Montana, expected to move toward Saipan immediately. But he and the rest of C Company, 1st Battalion of the 165th Infantry Regiment ended up circling endlessly for several hours. Their Amtrack finally headed for the beach at about 0400 on 17 June. As he neared the battle zone Howe was struck by a grim realization: he was at the very front on the boat. He was afraid he’d be the first casualty when the ramp dropped.

  But Howe was fortunate. He moved through the shallow surf until he could fall into the wet sand, then he advanced on his stomach. Howe served as a radio operator for Captain Paul Ryan, who was not so lucky. That afternoon he was killed by a mortar that struck a rock next to him.

  SERGEANT EDWIN LUCK lucked out on the first assignment he was given as a leader of the 1st Squad, 1st Platoon of G Company of the 105th Infantry Regiment. “There was no opposition to our landing,” he remembers, “but we got all hung up on the reefs, and we couldn’t go anyplace. We had to transfer into amphibious tractors. We landed at Charan Kanoa. Then it got really bad. We suffered a lot of casualties. One of our own cruisers moved in and mistakenly wiped out one of our battalion headquarters.”

  That was their first taste of combat.

  The “mortars” Luck and the men of the 27th used in training weren’t actual mortars—they were pieces of wood painted olive green, so they had to pretend a little. “I think there was one actual mortar in the whole regiment,” he said. The mortar squads were familiar with the sight mechanism and all the gears that went with a mortar, but they had zero experience with the actual weapon.

  The Japanese foes that Luck and the other members of the 27th Division fought were superb fighters. They were very skilled soldiers and were first-rate at fighting you to a standstill. “We found this out in the middle of a sugar cane field,” Luck said, “with Japs lying in there hidden under the sugar cane. None of us could see them, but they had no trouble at all seeing us.”

  CAPTAIN WILLIAM CORCORAN joined the 27th Division when he was barely fifteen years old, quite possibly becoming its youngest-ever member. It was in the depths of the Depression in 1933, and he was fairly tall, so they let him in.

  What followed for young Corcoran was probably the quickest round of promotions that any fifteen-year-old has ever seen—first to private first class, then to corporal, then to first sergeant—and he was still only sixteen years old. They had him train all the recruits that came in—maybe because he was nearer their age.

  By the time the war started Corcoran was a lieutenant. When Pearl Harbor was bombed they sent him off to artillery school, and he emerged as a twenty-six-year-old captain. And before going to Makin Island as his first assignment they gave him a job as operations officer for the 24th Corps.

  “We cleaned up Makin in three days, and they wrote me up for a Bronze Star for devising a plan for landing my men,” he recalled. “The funny thing about it was, I wasn’t even mentioned in the admiral’s statement. They sent the medal over, and I didn’t even know about it in advance. But I’ll tell you this: when we landed on Makin not a single shot was fired at us.” Now he hoped they could do the same at Saipan.

  THE FIRST APPLE KNOCKERS to reach the beach were from the 2nd Battalion of the 165th Infantry Regiment. These men waded onto dry land two full hours after they had left the rendezvous area. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Hart immediately ordered a system of patrols out to find and assemble the various units of the regiment on Blue Beach. This was a task that took well over an hour, and even then the entire regiment was not found.

  Company commanders searched until the wee hours of the morning, scrambling around in the darkness and gathering as many of their own men as they could find. At one point Captain Lawrence O’Brien of A Company of the 165th was challenged by a sentry who told him that a probable enemy counter-landing was expected on the beach, and no one had told him that the 165th was coming ashore. The fact that the sentry verbally challenged O’Brien before he opened fire prevented what would have amounted to an all-American slaughter.

  Units of the 165th were ordered to move to the far right side—the southern side of the Marine lines—and prepare to attack in the direction of the Aslito Airfield on the morning of 17 June. The scattered soldiers of the regiment made their way down the beach, hugging the waterline to avoid both enemy artillery and Marine patrols that might mistake them for Japanese.

  Once they found the Blue Beaches—it took about five hours in the darkness, with the only light coming from artillery flashes—the movement of the 165th Infantry Regiment south from there was an unbelievably slow and tedious process. Colonel Hart was forced to halt his men every few yards, answer challenges, and identify his command. The men were confined to a narrow strip of sand along the water’s edge to avoid contact with the units of Marines they continued to encounter. They were sometimes in the water, sometimes not.

  The men later dubbed Colonel Hart “Jumping Joe” for the number of times he led them to sprawl flat on the ground and get back up again. The name would stick with him for the rest of his Pacific career.

  One more serious challenge awaited the 165th Infantry Regiment. The troops, faced with crossing a thousand yards of open ground just as dawn was breaking, operated at double-time just as Japanese shelling began. The last soldier in the column, a man from B Company, was the only casualty. He was struck by fragments of the first shell to land in the area. It was almost full light of another day, 17 June.

  WE WENT IN with the Marines to support them, and there was an awful lot of small arms fire,” recalled Private First Class Donald Elliot, assistant driver of a tank in the Army’s 708th Amphibious Tank Battalion and also the operator of a .30-caliber machine gun on the front of the tank. After spending a year at Camp Chaffee in the constant company of the 27th Division, Elliot had assumed it would be troops of the 27th he would be ushering ashore. As it turned out, it was the Marines who marched close behind the tanks, and the 27th followed in their wake when they came ashore. The men of the 27th soon found out that the amphibious tanks were definitely not up to par. One .30-caliber bullet in the right place would knock one out. The armor in the tank was next to no armor at all.

  There were twenty-five tanks in the 708th Battalion, divided into five platoons with five member tanks each. But the Japanese had a wide variety of weapons to cope with them, including a 37-millimeter gun that no one in the battalion could locate. The Japanese were continuously moving it from place to place and putting new camouflage on it. They also had an old Swiss gun that knocked out four US tanks in quick succession—until a gunner finally spotted it and put a shot right into it.

  The 27th Division was realigned by morning, and their first attack was scheduled for 1130 on the Aslito Airfield, near the southern end of the island. The American brass wanted very urgently to capture the airfield, which in coming months would allow them to have direct access by the new B-29 Superfortresses to the home islands of Japan.

  A large part of the job was given to the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 165th Regiment, and they pressed the attack that morning. Their goals were the airfield and nearby Nafutan Point, located just southeast of the airfield. The Japanese had about fifteen hundred troops infesting the ridges behind the airfield and another five hundred supporting them at Nafutan Point.

  The first attack on the airfield was a complete washout. The Japanese artillery defending the airfield was not where it was supposed to be according to sketchy American intelligence. Instead of on a high ridge to the south, the heaviest weaponry was concentrated on Nafutan Point, an appendage of land jutting into the ocean near the airfield and separated from it by heavy undergrowth and coral outcroppings.

  The generally accepted theory that the Japanese could see infantry movements in the island’s va
st sugarcane fields was seriously flawed, the 27th quickly learned. The Japanese troops were high enough on the upper ridges to look down and trace every movement in the cane fields, then lay down deadly, accurate fire on the 27th Infantry.

  When the first assault failed, a second attack was to kick off at 1230 on 17 June after a brief round of US artillery fire. But it bogged down within a few minutes in the face of intense enemy fire. For two hours the US artillery bombarded the ridge from a distance, but the barrage did little damage to the Japanese defensive line.

  The airfield itself was undefended, but on the reverse slope of a ridge above it the Japanese had built some pillboxes and other fortifications, and these fortifications were the key to the airfield. As long as the slope remained in Japanese hands, the airfield could not be safely captured or supplied—much less have US planes taking off from it.

  The two unsuccessful attempts to take the high ground had been due largely to the failure of American artillery to damage the enemy holding it and also to the failure of US support fire to keep the Japanese underground long enough for infantry to reach them and destroy them. The solution was to call in the 249th Field Artillery to add to the amount of fire placed on the hill. The second was to move the cruiser USS Louisville up the Saipan Channel to the east, to a point where she could bring her guns to bear on the reverse slopes of the ridge. The use of a couple of tanks also helped.

  The tide didn’t turn until the morning of 18 June. With twice as many troops in line as on the previous day and with tanks laying down supporting fire in front of the troops, the enemy-held ridge was captured with very little actual fighting. The Japanese had pulled back to Nafutan Point, which would give the 27th Division pure hell for close to a week. The airfield itself, though, was a lost cause for the Japanese.