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

by Bill Sloan

  Domanowski found a spot on the beach where there were some bushes and small trees and decided to stay there. His left arm was useless, and the pain was severe. As he lay there on the beach, many other wounded men were brought in from the front lines for evacuation. He saw a group of soldiers heading for the water, where it was about three feet deep. “They were desperate men who wanted to hide, but the Japanese saw them and opened fire on them with machine guns,” he remembered. “You could hear the bullets hitting their skulls. I thanked God that I stayed in those bushes.”

  Early in the attack, under heavy fire and armed with a bazooka, Sergeant Thomas Baker, A Company of the 105th, was among those who picked up the standard of leadership. Baker destroyed a Japanese emplacement firing on his company and, a short time later, single-handedly attacked and killed two groups of Japanese soldiers. Wounded by a grenade that almost blew off his whole foot, Baker continued to man his position until all his ammunition was gone.

  Although barely able to move, Baker left his foxhole in search of more ammunition. He encountered Private First Class Frank Zielinski of A Company, 105th. Wounded himself, Zielinski picked up Baker and carried him about 150 yards until he was wounded for a second and third time. Captain Toft, who had been instrumental in launching the first artillery barrage against the Japanese, lifted Baker up and carried him until enemy fire tore into his stomach.

  Another soldier offered to carry him, but Baker turned him down. “I’ve caused enough trouble already,” Baker said. “I’ll stay here and take my chance. Just give me a cigarette. I’m done for anyway.”

  Tech Sergeant John McLoughlin of Troy, New York, also of A Company of the 105th, propped Baker against a tree trunk and gave him a .45-caliber pistol filled with eight rounds of ammunition. Sergeant C. V. Particelli, also from Troy and A Company of the 105th, lit a cigarette and handed it to Baker. As Patricelli turned away, he looked back at Baker for an instant and saw him holding a .45 in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Baker looked cool as a cucumber.

  A day and a half later, after the battle was over, returning Americans would find Baker’s body—the burnt-out cigarette butt in one hand and an empty pistol in the other. Surrounding him were eight dead Japanese. Like his commander, Colonel O’Brien, Baker was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism in battle.

  Captain Toft somehow made it from the field, but the stomach injury grew worse as the day wore on. He sensed he was dying. Sergeant Robert Smith of the 249th Field Artillery, sharing a foxhole with Toft, tried to reassure him. “No, I’m dying,” Toft said. “Please don’t let the Japs take me alive.”

  Smith knew what the enemy was capable of doing to a wounded man, so he stayed with Toft until he breathed his last.

  Later that morning a Japanese swordsman jumped into Smith’s foxhole with his saber half out of its sheath. Smith lunged up with his bayonet and rammed it into the enemy’s gut. When he withdrew the bayonet, the Japanese soldier half-jumped, half-stumbled away. Smith shot him just to make sure he wouldn’t be any more trouble.

  AT TANAPAG, FACED WITH dwindling ammo, a lack of water, and a critical shortage of medical supplies, the Americans fought off the incessant attack with every available man, wounded or otherwise, engaged in the action.

  Those who realized their buddies were running out of ammunition ducked from trench to trench picking up rifle bullets from the dead and wounded and carrying them to the men on the firing line. Three soldiers from E Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 105th—Staff Sergeant Homer Simms of Decatur, Illinois, and Privates First Class Thomas Daley of Brooklyn and Gerald Laucella of Schenectady—performed yeoman service in retrieving shells. Simms and Daley worked together: Daley collected the ammo, and Simms put it in clips.

  In addition to collecting ammo, Laucella began grabbing first-aid packets and turning them over to medics. As he bent down to pick up a packet, Laucella spotted two Japanese soldiers trying to penetrate the American lines. He shot one, then killed the other as he tried to get away.

  Several minutes of mortar fire from the Japanese scattered and disorganized the Americans but caused no casualties. Then the Japanese charged. The result was a massacre. The men of both the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 165th mowed down the attackers without suffering a single casualty. At least 300 enemy soldiers were killed in the initial charge. After that, they kept coming in groups that grew steadily smaller and smaller. When the attempts finally failed, more than 160 Japanese bodies were counted in the space of a few feet.

  At approximately 1130 two American artillery barrages mistakenly struck a group of about a hundred American soldiers who had left the Second Perimeter to try to make contact with the regimental CP and bring up help for the badly wounded. Several of them were killed and others wounded. The rest of the men panicked, and most of them splashed into the lagoon just below Tanapag. Some swam to the outlying reef 250 yards from the shore. Others blindly followed suit and dove into the water. Several of the wounded drowned while trying to reach the reef.

  Seventy-one men made it to the reef and were eventually picked up and rescued by a destroyer. About twenty-five others decided to turn back and return to shore, then banded together and established what became known as the Little Perimeter. It was about a quarter of a mile from the First Perimeter, and only a few feet of sand separated it from the ocean. About fifty other soldiers would join them as the day wore on.

  The Second Perimeter and the Little Perimeter were like small, isolated islands surrounded by a sea of enemy soldiers. There was no effective communication between the two, and neither made contact with any other Marine or 27th Division officers for most of the day.

  ABOUT NOON THE first signs of help came too late in the form of a platoon of medium tanks, which lumbered up the road from the 105th Infantry CP. The problem was that none of the tanks had a radio frequency, and neither Major Edward McCarthy nor anyone else had a way of communicating with them.

  The tanks rolled to a stop on the north side of the bridge that crossed Bloody Run and sat there for more than two hours. During that period they laid down an almost steady stream of fire on anything that resembled a Japanese hiding place. At one point McCarthy got inside one of the tanks and used the radio to plead for help, but he was unable to receive any intelligible answer.

  McCarthy decided to lead a group of thirty-five men, mostly walking wounded, to fight their way south to the regimental CP. He commandeered one of the tanks, and he and his men followed it down the road. They would lose half their men along the way, but when they finally reached the CP at 1500 he reported with full details on the situation at Tanapag. All available tanks were ordered to Tanapag and the Second and Little Perimeters.

  IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON scores of men from the 105th Infantry Regiment were still running into the village of Tanapag in search of shelter. Dozens sprinted to the waterfront, then turned with nowhere else to go to make a last stand at the edge of the beach, taking advantage of rows of ditches and concrete facilities that the Japanese had erected as beach defenses. They lay there for hours fighting off the Japanese, who came down the shoreline and over from the road. They fought off assault after assault.

  When the Japanese tried to come down the beach and move behind the ragged perimeter, Private Willie Hokohana of E Company, 105th, set his BAR in the crotch of a tree. Hokohana, a big Hawaiian, was just an ordinary rifleman, but he had picked up the BAR when one of his buddies was wounded. The weapon had been badly damaged, but Hokohana repaired it. He gathered a part here and a part there from other BARs until he had a working gun. He had carried the salvaged weapon back toward the Second Perimeter and picked out a tree with a trunk split about four feet above the ground. He settled his BAR in the crotch and started firing.

  Hokohana held his position most of the day, firing at the Japanese as they came along the water’s edge. All told, he would be unofficially credited with killing about 140 Japanese before darkness obscured his view. He was exposed to a tremendous hail of small-arms fire
and mortar shell fragments, but he suffered only one minor wound during his hours of firing.

  Sergeant William Baralis of Troy, New York, joined Hokohana in defending the beach and the perimeters. A pitcher on the A Company, 105th, baseball team, he gathered up as many grenades as he could find and threw about 150 of them, killing close to a hundred Japanese before an enemy bullet struck him in the spine. He died the next day in a field hospital.

  By about 1800, as the sun was setting, they had managed, against all odds, to hold the Second Perimeter amid the slaughter. The fury of the gyokusai had subsided to a great extent, and the ranks of the Japanese had been decimated. The stonewall defense the 105th had put up had stopped and dispersed the enemy, but Japanese soldiers still lurked behind every bush and tree, in every ditch and furrow, and under every sort of construction. From these vantage points they continued to pour fire on anything that moved. The two patchwork American perimeters were still holding tight, weathering the storm like islands in a hostile sea.

  Months—and even years—later the vast majority of men in the 105th Regiment admitted to being scared to death throughout the nightmarish day of 7 July. But one young man in C Company didn’t seem to know the meaning of fear.

  He was Private Celso Flores, an eighteen-year-old fondly called “the Kid” by nearly everyone in his battalion. He had always complained about his choice of shots at the Japanese, but that was before he took part in the first counterattack and they heard him yell as he fired his rifle: “Holy cow! Just look at them! Oh boy! Oh boy!”

  Nobody knows for sure how many Japanese Flores killed that day, but from his shouts it must have been a dozen or more. He was one of the last Americans to leave the Second Perimeter. Although he was wounded, the older members of the company almost had to drag him away. “I’ll never get as many shots as this again,” he told them.

  There were also occasional incidents when laughter—at least when it was over—was the only real response.

  Private First Class Marcus Itano of C Company in the 105th had a near-deadly experience as he took cover with a body of men he thought were Americans. He started out with a large group who were going to try to break through the Japanese lines to get back to their own lines. That was how confused the situation had become in the afternoon of 7 July as the day wore on.

  They were just getting ready to leave when a heavy artillery barrage hit them. Some of the men were killed and badly shot up—about half of them. They started to run and got hit again. Then everyone headed for the water.

  Itano ran about fifty yards, keeping pretty low, and when he looked up he spotted about twenty men ahead of him. They were lying prone on the beach with their backs to him and seemed to be looking at something across the way. They had on the same green uniforms—just like his own.

  He thought he’d join them, so he ran right into the center of the group and lay down. Nobody paid any attention to him. He must have laid there for two or three minutes. Then he poked the man next to him to find out what they were looking at.

  When the man turned toward him, Itano found himself face to face with a Japanese soldier. He had a grenade on his shoulder strap, and as Itano jumped to his feet, he pulled the grenade loose and yanked the pin. Then he dropped it and ran like hell.

  He stepped on heads and backs and everything else getting out of there. The grenade went off, but he didn’t turn around to see how much damage it did.

  THE LAST MAN left the Tanapag area and the Little and Second Perimeters at about 2200. When the battle was finally over two battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment—the 1st and the 2nd—had essentially ceased to exist. There were more than nine hundred deaths and casualties from their combined strength of twelve hundred men.

  Every officer in the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 105th was killed or wounded except for Lieutenant John F. Mulhern of B Company, 1st Battalion, and Major Edward McCarthy, commander of the 2nd Battalion.

  A total of 1,694 Japanese bodies were found in the areas defended by the 105th and 106th Infantry Regiments.

  chapter 9

  The Aftermath

  ON 8 JULY, while handfuls of the Japanese who had staged the gyokusai were still alive and capable of trouble, Marines of the 2nd and 4th Divisions moved north toward Marpi Point in the northernmost section of Saipan to conduct a final sweep to clean out the few remaining points of enemy resistance.

  Marpi Point had originally been the American objective for Day 9 of the invasion, but it took until Day 23 to wrest it from a scattering of Japanese. Most of the survivors were hidden in caves, and when they were ordered out, most of them killed themselves with hand grenades.

  If civilians were thought to be in the caves, Americans would try to persuade them to surrender. But most of these overtures were also answered with an explosion of grenades.

  “We rarely saw any live Japanese,” remembered Chester Szech, a Marine corpsman. “Every time we saw Japanese, they were already dead. When they approached a cave, they would tell the occupants to come out and surrender. If they didn’t come out, we’d turn the flamethrower on them, and that would be the end of it.”

  That wasn’t always the case. Gunnery Sergeant Keith Renstrom of the 25th Marines would recall the “glorious feeling” of saving about twenty civilians on the brink of starvation in one cave. Renstrom laid aside his Thompson submachine gun and happily poured water into the mouths of the crowd before sending them off to a refugee camp.

  THERE WAS ONE pint-sized Marine, however, who earned the name the “Pied Piper of Saipan” for his humane heroics to save literally hundreds of refugees—both enemy soldiers and civilians—from certain death. Private First Class Guy Gabaldon single-handedly talked more than a thousand Japanese soldiers and civilians into coming out of their caves and pillboxes and surrendering.

  Gabaldon, who stood barely five-feet-four, joined the Marines when he was seventeen years old and became a scout and observer with the 2nd Marines. As a Mexican American youngster in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, he had grown up with a Japanese family and played every day with two little Japanese boys. At the age of twelve he had moved in with a Japanese family named Nakano, and he spoke a lot more Japanese than English—a skill that precious few other Marines had. Most importantly, he knew that what he told the Japanese on Saipan was true.

  After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the Nakano family was among more than 100,000 Japanese Americans who were sent to internment camps across the country. These internments upset Gabaldon, and they were a primary reason he joined the Marines in 1943.

  “The first night I was on Saipan I went out on my own,” Gabaldon recalled. “I always worked on my own, and I brought back two prisoners, using my backstreet Japanese.”

  His commander, Colonel John Schwabe, scolded him, but Gabaldon went out again and came back with twelve more Japanese. Schwabe had first threatened a court martial, but now he gave Gabaldon explicit permission to continue.

  “He would go up to the mouth of that cave and jabber, jabber, jabber—and pretty soon somebody would dribble out,” Schwabe said.

  With his pockets full of ammo and rations and a few grenades hanging from his belt, he took off for enemy country. He was nervous, but he knew this could be either a terribly foolish move or it could earn him the recognition he needed to be an official interpreter.

  He told no one what he was going to do, not even his closest friend. It was about 2100 when he shoved off for Japland. His greatest danger just starting out was getting shot by his own men, so he had to be extremely careful.

  He crawled for more than an hour until he came to a cave and smelled shouya and seafood, favorite foods of the Japanese. He crept as close to the entrance as he could and listened to several hushed Japanese voices. They were talking about the “coming defeat of the American devils” when the Japanese fleet returned. They had no idea that the US Task Force 58 had shot down their ships and planes.

  Gabaldon quickly came up with a pla
n. As the sun was about to rise, he would toss two fragment grenades in succession into the dugout, then a smoke grenade. The smoke emerging from the cave was accompanied by Japanese soldiers with their hands high in the air. He told the soldiers he had many Marines with him and warned them that if they did not surrender, he would kill them.

  He counted twelve prisoners. Several later gave valuable information that increased the Marines’ effectiveness throughout the rest of the campaign. This became the start of his “freelance” operation on Saipan.

  Gabaldon always warned the Japanese that they would die if they chose to stay hidden—and he later admitted that he had killed thirty-three of those who had tried to resist him. He told them that Marines were not the torturers that they had been repeatedly portrayed as. The people in the caves would be given food and medical care and had no reason to fear the Americans if they surrendered.

  Often civilians were with the Japanese soldiers—in many cases women and children. They were hungry, and many were suffering from leprosy, dengue fever, and shellshock. Fear of the Americans would cause thousands of women and children to blow themselves up with grenades or jump to their death from high cliffs.

  Gabaldon’s successful efforts, in fact, may have reached as high as 1,500 saved Japanese, although in a book he wrote later he merely claimed a total of “over 1,000.” Major James High, a Marine officer, was there when Guy brought in a total of 800 prisoners at once. “Everyone in the regiment was talking about it,” High recalled.

  Gabaldon’s exploits would become a matter of public record in 1957 when Ralph Edwards put together a segment for NBC’s This Is Your Life, which brought a new wave of fame. Then Hollywood producers became interested in the story, and in 1960 a film entitled Hell to Eternity was released. Jeffrey Hunter played the part of Gabaldon, whose ethnicity was changed to Italian American.