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

by Bill Sloan

  And there were plenty of Japanese still alive, as the Americans were about to learn.

  chapter 7

  “Something’s Coming!”

  WHEN SERGEANT JOHN SIDUR of the 27th Division’s 105th Infantry Regiment heard the screams of a small baby from somewhere in the back of the cave, he winced.

  Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien had warned him that many of the caves where Japanese soldiers were hiding might contain children, even young babies. “It’s a sick job we have to do, John, but somebody’s got to do it—and unfortunately it’s you,” O’Brien told him. He added pointedly that the Japanese soldiers in those caves with guns and explosives had to be eliminated—“no matter what happens.”

  The two Japanese interpreters who stood with Sidur at the cave’s entrance—they had been brought to Saipan from the Hawaiian Islands—seemed to know exactly what they were doing. “You’ve got five minutes to come out of the cave,” they yelled in Japanese. “If you don’t come out in five minutes, we will blow the cave up, and everyone in it will die. If you come out, you will not be harmed in any way. You will be taken to a refugee shelter and be given food and water. No harm will be done to anyone. You have my word on that.”

  The interpreter paused for a moment to listen. At first there were no noises. Then they again heard the cries of a young baby, followed by a masculine voice that said something to the child that ended in a shout.

  “No, no,” a young man’s voice said. A woman began to cry out and moan. Sidur could hear the children screaming.

  Those outside the cave wanted desperately to get the children out of there alive, but there was nothing anyone could do unless they got cooperation from the inside, and Sidur knew that this was almost hopeless. The children started screaming even louder and the women were crying. Sidur turned away, shaking his head and feeling helpless.

  My God, he thought, this is the worst job I’ve ever had. He wasn’t sure how much of this he could stand, but it had to be done.

  After a long silence the two Japanese from Hawaii tried one more time. “You have three minutes to come out and you will be cared for. No harm will come to you. You will be given food and water, a comfortable place to sleep. All you have to do is come out of the cave.”

  The seconds dragged by. By Sidur’s watch, six minutes had passed.

  “I’m giving you one more chance,” the man said. “If you come out now, everything will be fine. Please come out. I beg of you!”

  For a long instant there was only silence from the cave.

  Finally there was the lonely sound of an infant crying. Then the interpreter signaled the Marines standing by, ready with the explosives. Then there was the thundering boom of satchel charges of TNT going off.

  Sidur bit his lip and turned away.

  LIEUTENANT ED BALE of Dallas watched the Japanese soldiers push women and children off the cliffs to their death. Bale had earned a Marine commission at Texas A&M and joined the 2nd Marine Division in New Zealand. He had endured the fight at Tarawa, but seeing what was happening on Saipan was somehow even worse.

  The Japanese soldiers wouldn’t let the civilians even approach American lines. They would throw them off the cliffs first. There were interpreters up there trying to talk the soldiers into surrendering, but the Japanese soldiers killed many of the women who wanted to come into the American positions.

  “We were horrified by it, but after a while, I don’t think we were surprised,” Bale remembered. “I think that after we got over the initial shock, we simply knew there was no way to stop it.” If the Marines attempted to stop the slaughter, they would have to kill innocent civilians themselves, and there had been enough civilians killed by Marines inadvertently as it was.

  One dead woman, a native of the islands, was killed and left lying on her back at a road junction. No one bothered to move her for days. Instead, they used her as a guidepost for troops moving up the mountainside.

  “When they were giving the truck drivers directions to bring supplies up, they’d say, ‘Go up to where that dead woman is lying on her back, and then turn left or right,’” Bale said. “It was a horrible-looking sight, but after a while it just became a fact of life.”

  WHEN THE SUN ROSE on 5 July the Japanese were defeated in every sense of the word—and they knew it. The rapid and virtually uncontested advance by American troops strongly indicated the total collapse of General Saito’s plans to establish a final defensive line across the entire northernmost neck of Saipan.

  In fact, the 4th Marine Division had already overrun the entire left flank of this proposed line. Japan’s 136th Infantry Regiment should have fought to contest this ground, but the remains of that unit were scattered and isolated in pockets—more than a few with children—behind the American lines. All that remained under Saito’s control was in the 27th Division’s area, and even there the defense was disorganized and confused. Japanese officers captured on that day told of their front-line units being mixed up and the communications badly disorganized. There was little or no organized resistance, no organized supply plan, and very little artillery, if any, remaining.

  Three Army tanks appeared at midafternoon, led by Lieutenant Willis Dorsey of Newton, Kansas. They came upon some Japanese massed in a ditch, almost shoulder to shoulder, and opened fire using machine guns and canister, killing approximately 150 of the enemy. This allowed the 105th Infantry Regiment to resume its planned offensive in the area. Earlier Dorsey had performed a similar service for the 3rd Battalion when Japanese machine gunfire from a palm grove slowed them down.

  Everywhere the Japanese forces turned they seemed to be facing imminent defeat. They were almost out of food and water. One Japanese report would tell of troops being without drinking water for three days, holding out by chewing the leaves of trees and eating snails.

  What Japanese General Saito termed “the bitter end” was rapidly approaching for himself and an estimated seven thousand men still under his command.

  LIEUTENANT JOHN GRAVES of the 4th Marines was having ongoing trouble with his injured left eye. They had carried him into a hospital on a stretcher. He was getting around, but he had to hobble a little because of problems with the eye. The hospital was on a hill overlooking Pearl Harbor, and the first thing he saw was a nurse he had dated in San Diego. Her nickname was Hobbie, and she somehow managed to find him a spot in the senior officer’s ward.

  Graves would be there for a month or so, and they still couldn’t get the eye to function properly. It got infected, and they sent him to another hospital in Long Beach, where one of the two ophthalmologists on the staff wanted to take it out. By now he too simply wanted to get rid of the damn thing. But the other doctor had seniority, and the two doctors had a sort of rivalry going. So they kept him there and tried one thing then another, hoping something good would happen. And the eye finally “calmed down,” although he still couldn’t see more than a little daylight out of it.

  At the Long Beach hospital he had a roommate who had been a rookie second lieutenant with the troops attacking Tarawa. This was where the Marine Corps learned that landing boats couldn’t usually cope with coral reefs. The roommate’s name was Warren, and he was assigned to bring forty or fifty men to shore in an LCVP (land craft, vehicle, personnel), better known as a Higgins boat. The landing was hotly contested, with Japanese machine gun and mortar fire everywhere.

  Warren signaled the coxswain to lower the ramp, which the coxswain gladly did. Then Warren hollered, “Follow me!” and led the men out into about eight feet of water on the other side of the reef, with bullets coming in thick and fast. Warren was struck in the legs and paralyzed from the hips down, but he could tell that story—laughing like hell—and Graves would laugh with him.

  WITH THE JAPANESE hovering on the ragged edge of defeat, Holland Smith had every reason to believe that the remaining enemy troops would stage a banzai attack of some sort as a grand finale. “With this thought hard in my mind,” he would later write, “I had issued a spec
ial Corps order on 2 July, warning all units to take special precautions against nocturnal mass attacks and to button up their lines each night by physical contact.”

  He followed up by visiting the 27th Division’s command post on the afternoon of 5 July and warning General Griner that a banzai attack would probably come down Tanapag Plain late that night or early the next morning. Holland Smith was very familiar with past banzai attacks against the Marines on Guadalcanal and especially on the Arctic island of Attu in 1943, when a defeated Japanese garrison stormed American lines. American losses were 580 troops killed and about a thousand wounded.

  Even with Holland Smith’s warning, there was no serious alert to what was coming. Staff officers at the 105th Infantry Regiment’s command post believed that what enemy resistance remained would be minimal the next day.

  All the information available indicated that the Japanese had been reduced to a small force incapable of withstanding an attack. Most of the men were led to believe that all that was left to do was a matter of two or three days of mopping up a not very formidable force. It was the first night they could remember on the island when there wasn’t artillery fire all night long. Usually there were star bursts and star shells that would light up the landscape. But on this particular night, aside from the fact that it was raining and dark in the earlier part of the evening, there was no such support.

  The night was highly uncomfortable for men on the front lines. Rain came down in torrents. Foxholes flooded, and sleep was next to impossible. Sidur lost his helmet when he was caught in the midst of a furious downpour while trying to hold onto his M-1.

  Tucked away in the lining of the helmet was the only photo he had of the girl he intended to marry when he got home. The photo blew away in the gusty wind, and although Sidur tried his best to pick up his helmet, it rolled away and was lost.

  When Colonel O’Brien and his radioman, Sergeant Ronald Johnson, finished digging their slit trenches that night, O’Brien took his wallet out of his pocket. He opened it and sat for a while looking at a picture inside it. Then he handed his wallet to Johnson and pointed to the picture.

  “This is what I’m fighting for,” O’Brien said.

  Johnson looked in his wallet and saw a photo of O’Brien’s wife and young son.

  BY THE AFTERNOON of 5 July the Japanese on Saipan were in desperate shape. After three long weeks in which the American invaders had fought hard, suffered heavy casualties, and lost a lot of good men, they were now in a position to make full use of the Aslito Airfield and to pound the remaining Japanese with long-range artillery and naval gunfire until they surrendered or died.

  The headquarters of General Saito, commander of all the remaining Japanese forces on the island, was located in a cave a thousand yards from the village of Makunsha. The gaunt general and his half-starved staff gathered to make what plans they could—there wasn’t much left to save. Saito had been wounded by a piece of shrapnel, and he looked very old and disheartened. But he had a new plan, and he told them about it.

  Before dawn the following morning, 6 July, the Japanese would stage one last glorious attack on the invaders and die proclaiming the everlasting life of their emperor. In a material sense there was nothing to be gained from the attack except death. The Americans were everywhere and had won the battle. All the Japanese could do now was attempt to extract seven lives for each of their own in a massive banzai attack against the “American devils.”

  If any American could have read the letter General Saito sent to all Japanese officers on Saipan on the morning of 5 July, they would have known in advance what to expect:

  I am addressing the officers and men of the Imperial Army on Saipan.

  For more than twenty days since the American Devils attacked, the officers, men and civilian employees of the Imperial Army and Navy on this island have fought well and bravely. Everywhere they have demonstrated the honor and glory of the Imperial forces. I expected that every man would do his duty.

  Heaven has not given us an opportunity. We have not been able to utilize fully the terrain. We have fought in unison up to the present time but now we have no materials with which to fight and our artillery for attack has been completely destroyed. Our comrades have fallen one after another. Despite the bitterness of defeat we pledge “seven lives to repay our country.”

  The barbarous attack of the enemy is being continued. Even though the enemy has occupied only a corner of Saipan, we are dying without avail under the violent shelling and bombing. Whether we attack or whether we stay where we are, there is only death. However, in death there is life. We must utilize this opportunity to exalt true Japanese manhood. I will advance with those who remain to deliver still another blow to the American Devils and leave my bones on Saipan as a bulwark of the Pacific.

  As it says in the Semjinkum [a volume of Battle Ethics], “I will never suffer the disgrace of being taken alive” and “I will offer up the courage of my soul and calmly rejoice in living by the eternal principle.”

  Here I pray for you for the eternal life of the Emperor and the welfare of the country and I advance to seek out the enemy.

  Follow me!

  If those he commanded had literally followed the example of General Saito, there would have been no attack. The exhausted, wounded general, feeling that he was too aged and infirm to be of use in what he was asking for, held a farewell feast of saki and canned crabmeat and then committed suicide. His guest for the occasion was Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, the architect of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, who did likewise.

  Cleaning off a spot on the rock, Saito sat down. Facing the misty east and saying “Tenno Heika! Banzai!” (Long live the Emperor!), he drew his own blood first with his sword. Then his adjutant shot him in the head with a pistol.

  As General Saito and Admiral Nagumo conducted their own honorable deaths, Japanese soldiers, sailors, and some civilians gathered in the fields and woods north of the US lines near Makunska. By nightfall on 6 July able-bodied Japanese soldiers were converging on a set of rendezvous points. The troops had been told that anyone incapable of reaching the assembly points on his own would be shot or allowed to commit suicide.

  About an hour after darkness fell on the early evening of 6 July an American soldier patrolling the road near the command post of the 3rd Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment, discovered a lone, armed Japanese soldier lying asleep. When the American took the Japanese prisoner and sent him routinely back to headquarters for interrogation, his testimony was sufficient cause for alarm.

  An all-out attack by all remaining Japanese forces on Saipan, the soldier said, had been ordered for early the next morning. This information was then conveyed to all major US units of the division as well as to Holland Smith’s headquarters. The basic message was to prepare for the worst.

  Over the next hour or more, mixed or muddled communications became commonplace. As soon as the word reached Colonel William O’Brien, commander of the 1st Battalion, 105th, and Major Edward McCarthy, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 105th, both attempted to reach a higher authority about reinforcing an existing five-hundred-yard gap in the American lines, but both received word that no one was available for this assignment. A call also went out to division headquarters, but it too received a negative response. If any response was made, it would have to be with whatever troops the two battalion commanders could put together themselves.

  Consequently O’Brien’s 1st Battalion of the 105th took up positions ahead of the front lines and dug in east of the railroad tracks. McCarthy’s 2nd Battalion also moved to a defensive line straddling the coast road that ran fifty yards from the beach.

  Near the front line the men knew that something big was about to happen.

  The sound the Japanese troops made as they prepared for the assault was a heavy, steady roar that seemed to shake the countryside. “We began to hear this buzz,” said First Sergeant Mario Occinario of the 1st Battalion, 105th. “It was the damnedest noise I ever heard, and it kept getting louder
and louder.”

  O’Brien conferred with McCarthy, and defenses were tightened somewhat between the 1st and 2nd Battalions. O’Brien moved his machine guns nearer to the railroad tracks. But both commanders knew that gaps still existed in their lines, and neither one had the personnel to cover the smaller openings, much less the large and dangerous five-hundred-yard gap.

  O’Brien again called regimental headquarters to ask for reserves, but the request was denied. Lieutenant Colonel Leslie M. Jensen contacted division headquarters and repeated the request, but it again was denied.

  Normally the battalion established a perimeter defense for the night with soldiers facing outward in a rough circle to protect themselves. But there were not enough men to create a solid defensive line, and the perimeter was not closed on all sides. The Japanese sent patrols to probe the front lines and quickly uncovered these gaps in the American defenses.

  Because of this, these refusals to send extra men to cover the gaps would prove to be a major mistake, as the Japanese were allowed to penetrate between the 1st and 3rd Battalions and then virtually annihilate the 1st and 2nd Battalions. Filling the lapses in the darkness would have proved extremely difficult because all units were stretched extremely thin by this time. The sound the Japanese were making rose in intensity until everybody could hear it. “It was like the sound of bees inside a hive,” remembered Sergeant John Sidur, who was now on the front lines with the 105th Infantry’s 2nd Battalion. The 2nd and 3rd Battalions were positioned across the so-called Tanapag Plain along Saipan’s western shore. The two battalions would bear the harsh brunt of the coming assault.

  “It was the sound of the enemy forming up to attack,” Sidur recalled. “If you listened carefully, you could almost tell they were repeating the same word over and over again, but it was hard to tell what it was.”