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

by Bill Sloan

The 4th Marines took full advantage of the sea power turned loose on Tinian to rush its assault elements ashore in slightly more than 500 LVTs and 130 DUKWs (amphibious trucks). These vehicles penetrated Japanese defenses at White Beach, and although enemy mines and machine guns slowed the advance temporarily, the Marines had the mobility to roll inland in a hurry.

  General Clifford Cates had learned from his experience at Guadalcanal how important it was to get his tanks, half-tracks, and light artillery ashore well before sundown. He also landed enough barbed wire to cover the extended perimeter so that the Japanese couldn’t surprise his troops. The hurry-up tempo of off-loading never paused for a moment. By nightfall Cates had 15,000 Marines ashore on the narrow beaches, and the cost in lives had been amazingly light—only 15 Marines were killed and 225 wounded.

  “The Japs were hell bent and determined,” Pase said. “They were willing to sacrifice every Jap on the island if they could stop us. Well, they sacrificed every Jap they had, and they still didn’t stop us!”

  Men who fought their way through oceans of sugar cane on Saipan couldn’t believe the amount of cane they now encountered on Tinian. The land was almost exclusively cane fields, and the Japanese knew how to hide themselves perfectly under a few sheets of cane. The open fields were hazardous enough—they offered clear fields of fire to anyone dug in on the far side—but you could only see a few feet ahead in the unharvested fields.

  PRIVATE FIRST CLASS BILL STEEL of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, had been wounded at Tarawa and wounded again at Saipan. When he got ready to get off the boat at Tinian, he was scared to death—this was his third campaign, and everybody said it was the worst. “I urinated all over myself; that’s how scared I was,” he remembered.

  “It’s like a guy going to his death in the electric chair or something,” Steel said. “They feed you steak and eggs at about four o’clock in the morning, like it was a ritual of some kind.” Once he got ashore, however, he was all right.

  That first night on Tinian Steel’s unit came ashore near the Ushi Point Airfield. Their first job was killing pilots, air crewmen, and mechanics. All the Japanese had been shot up and just left there. The Japanese were all wearing dungaree flying suits—that was how the Marines knew they were in the air force. They moved across the island, swung around to clear out everything on their left flank, then started down the island with their front line all the way across it.

  “We didn’t really know at the time what was going on,” Steel recalled. “We’d never heard of the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb, but this was the airport they would use when the time came. I was back home by then. The Navy gave orders that people who had been wounded twice could go home, and I got on the list. I got back to the States on December 7, 1944.”

  COLONEL OGATA WAS furious that he’d misjudged the main thrust of the Marine landing, and he tried his best to reverse the situation that night by sending several thousand of his troops, led by tanks, in an attack on the American perimeter. The assault came after a heavy artillery barrage, but once again General Cates was too smart for them. Star shells fired from offshore destroyers helped backlight the Japanese attackers, and Marine tanks, half-tracks, and machine guns exacted a hefty toll on Japanese infantry entangled in barbed wire.

  When it was over the Marines had held at every point. After sunrise they counted fifteen hundred dead Japanese surrounding their perimeter.

  “We’ve broken their backs,” said Cates.

  Early that morning the 2nd Marine Division landed on White Beach and maintained the momentum of the previous day. The two divisions moved out together and quickly reached the east coast of Tinian. There they turned southward and began moving down the island. A few Japanese units fought hard to stop them, but many of Ogata’s surviving forces retreated rapidly to the south.

  ABOUT HALF THE TIME at Tinian our troops never had any officers around,” remembered Private First Class Carl Peltier of the 2nd Marines, who grew up in Texas. He was one of only twenty-two survivors in his 81-millimeter mortar platoon, which hit the beach at Saipan with sixty-two men. A total of forty members of the platoon had been either killed or seriously wounded.

  “Those guys who were left knew what we had to do that second time around, and we did it,” said Peltier. “One time a lieutenant showed up, and we were all excited. But the first night he was there, he was sitting around talking to us when a sniper got him. He didn’t die right then, but he died a short time later. Then we were right back with no officers.

  “Most of the guys were still privates who came in as replacements. Since I was a private first class I caught a lot of flak about it. I was small too—a feather merchant if there ever was one—who was barely five-feet-four and weighed 125 pounds after a full meal.” Peltier had just turned nineteen, but he was already savvy enough to know how to swipe BARs and Thompson submachine guns from the Army people. “We used to hide them in our 81-millimeter mortars,” he said. “Nobody had the nerve to look down those guns.”

  One time he found himself sitting just two foxholes away from a Japanese. When the interloper was discovered, the Marines all quickly dove in their foxholes. “They sent out a patrol and they got him, but he was well camouflaged,” recalled Peltier. “He was in the middle of a cane field, and he was inside a concrete box that looked a little like a coffin—and when the patrol got through with him, it really was a coffin. God knows how long that Jap had been there without any food or water or anything else.”

  Peltier said he didn’t like being called a hero, but when he found out later on that his men were the most-decorated 81-millimeter mortar platoon of World War II, he did enjoy calling himself “a survivor.” “I earned that,” he said, “because of Saipan and Tinian.”

  CORPORAL ROY ROUSH of the 6th Marines heard by way of the grapevine that there was another man named Roush who had recently joined his G Company on Tinian.

  When he heard the news he wanted to meet the guy. Because there weren’t a whole lot of people named Roush, he started asking where this new guy was.

  “He’s over there in the other end of the company line,” he was told. Roush number one intended to look up the man and introduce himself, but before he got around to it there was a brief banzai attack, and Roush number two suffered a bullet wound. “He was carried out, and I never actually saw the guy,” said Roush. “But we had a first sergeant that was, well, kind of a stumblebum, and he thought the wounded man was me, and he sent a telegram to my parents, and it was never corrected.”

  The telegram sent to his parents said, “Sorry to inform you that Roy William Roush was injured in the Battle of Tinian.” In a few weeks he started getting letters from his folks and a lot of other people, asking how he was, where he got hit, and so forth.

  “I finally figured out what had happened, but I still don’t know if the parents of Roush number two ever got the word. And I got to wondering what would’ve happened if Roush number two had been killed. Would that first sergeant have done the same thing? Would he have sent a letter saying ‘Sorry to inform you that your son, Roy Roush, was killed in action on Tinian’?”

  FROM 27 TO 30 July both Marine divisions made rapid advances toward the plateau that dominated the southern tip of the island. For two days General Schmidt used an “elbowing” technique. On the first day he held back the 4th Division while the 2nd Division surged forward. On the second day the roles were exchanged. On the 29th this technique was abandoned, and both divisions were ordered to advance as rapidly as possible.

  “The first of August about 2:30 in the morning we had the Japanese pushed back into a small area,” remembered Platoon Sergeant Joe Brown of the 2nd Marine Division, a native of Wichita Falls, Texas. “We were fending off banzai attacks all that night. We had a breakthrough, and they came in at us hard with demolition and hand grenades.”

  The rest of his platoon—those who weren’t wounded—had fallen back and left Brown and Lieutenant Stacy Davis all alone. “He was in the hole with me, and he had a m
achine gun and was firing at ’em when my little carbine misfired,” said Brown. “This little Jap came up while we were on our knees in the foxhole. He made a stab at me, and when he did, I got hit by his bayonet. It went in my right arm and slid up under the bones in my shoulder.”

  Brown was able to grab the muzzle of the rifle, catch the Japanese around the legs, pull him down, and crawl on top of him. Brown still had the rifle in his hands. “I don’t know how I held onto it because the wound in my arm was about eight or ten inches long, but I got the stock of the rifle in my hand and beat him with the hand that was numb. I beat him until I was sure he was dead meat. Then I crawled back toward my foxhole through the intermittent fire.”

  Meanwhile Lieutenant Davis’s machine gun was out of ammo, but he kept knocking Japanese soldiers down all around Brown with a rifle until Brown reached safety.

  “You got ’em, Joe; you got ’em!” Davis yelled between shots.

  “Hell yeah,” Brown said. “I got ’em!”

  For Brown and his section it was the first banzai attack they had experienced. “I wasn’t involved in the big banzai on Saipan,” he said, “because we were in another part of the field. But the Japanese were fanatic fighters, and life really didn’t mean anything to them. They’d either kill themselves or do something to make you shoot them. They weren’t about to let you take them prisoner.”

  Brown was taken to an aid station and later was put aboard the USS Relief, a hospital ship. After a scare with gangrene in his injured leg, he spent twenty days in treatment in Hawaii for a torn ligament, then was flown home to Texas.

  PHARMACIST’S MATE H. L. OBERMILLER came ashore with the Marines. A few nights later, when his unit bivouacked, they stretched a trip wire about a foot off the ground so the Japanese would hit it and set off an alarm. One night some civilians came through. The sentry shot at them, and you could hear people running.

  “I started back there, and they threw me a light, and I found a little girl,” remembered Obermiller. “She was about a year and a half or two years old, and she was tied to an old man’s back with a rope.” The old man had been shot, and the bullet had gone through him and hit the little girl. Her left kidney was outside her body. Obermiller cut her loose and protected her from the rain that was falling and did what he could to dress her wound. “I sent her down to the aid station in the morning when the sun came up,” he said. “I frankly don’t know how she could have lived. It’s an incident that has haunted me for a long time.”

  As on Saipan, a Japanese banzai attack was repulsed on Tinian with heavy losses for the Japanese. Colonel Ogata personally led the attack, which was directed primarily at units of the 8th Marines atop a high cliff. For a full half-hour the attackers charged the Marine lines, but at no point did they penetrate. Every charge was turned back with mounting losses.

  According to some reports Ogata was killed during the charges by American machine gunfire, and his body was seen hanging dead over a section of the Marines’ barbed wire. Other reports said Ogata was seen alive on 2 August, a day after Tinian was declared secured—but that “security” was often fleeting. The 8th Regiment of the 2nd Marine Division spent three months mopping up—in which they killed 542 enemy soldiers and themselves suffered 38 killed and 125 wounded.

  After the banzai assault, daybreak revealed over 100 enemy dead in one small area about seventy yards square. Interrogation of prisoners later revealed that the Japanese attackers participating in the assault had numbered between 600 and 800. With the defeat of this last counterattack, organized Japanese resistance quickly came to an end. Altogether the capture of Tinian had cost a total of 328 Marines killed and 1,571 wounded in action. Over 5,000 Japanese were buried, and 252 were taken prisoner. Exactly what happened to the approximately 4,000 remaining Japanese defenders is not known. A large number of them undoubtedly committed suicide in caves, and some may have escaped in small boats to other islands.

  Coming so soon after the long, tedious battle for Saipan, the fight for Tinian was almost like a sprint. As General Cates put it later on, “The Marines were heading for the barn.”

  It took seven days to capture Tinian, and during those days word had finally spread among the Marines. There was something far greater on Tinian than mere cane fields. There were also airfields—and that was why Tinian’s capture was so enormously important.

  chapter 11

  Coming Home

  ALTHOUGH THERE would be greater losses of human life and spilled blood at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the two epic and final struggles of the Pacific War, the battles of Saipan and Tinian made America’s victory in the Pacific inevitable. The struggle cost US forces a combined grand total of more than fourteen thousand killed, wounded, and missing in action.

  But there were also wounded men who never acknowledged their wounds. In the ranks of the hundreds of thousands of US troops engaged in the battles, countless GIs, some as young as seventeen and eighteen years old, suffered irreparable and undiagnosed inner damage to their spirits and souls. They suffered from an ailment that has affected hundreds of thousands of war veterans over the years, but in the 1940s it was an unknown. Some people called it “the shakes.” To some people it was like the end of the world.

  We know it today as posttraumatic stress disorder.

  SEAMAN JAMES SAUNDERS came from a sharecropper farm at Blackwell, Texas, and he had just turned seventeen when Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor. “We were all mad as hell,” he remembered. “I wanted to do something to get back at the Japs, but my dad said I had to wait.”

  Saunders’s only brother was a couple of years older than James, and two days after Pearl Harbor he joined the Navy. He was aboard the submarine USS Scorpion when it was lost with all hands after striking a Japanese mine in January 1944. By then James had dropped out of high school. On 15 January 1943, like his brother, he enlisted in the Navy.

  “They gave me a choice of what I wanted to do,” he said. “What I really wanted was to be a fighter pilot, but that didn’t work out. My next choice was submarines, but that didn’t work out either. I finally just told them, ‘Just give me a gun and head me west.’”

  He was sent to gunnery school for about six months, then he joined the first crew of the USS Miami, a brand-new cruiser nicknamed “The South Seas Debutante.” Next stop was Eniwetok, where the crew joined the task force of the US Third Fleet.

  But on his way to his first island mission James caught a severe case of “jungle rot” in the Philippines and came close to dying from it. “I just rotted from my belt up,” he said. “My hair all came out until my head was as slick as a peel, and I had a fever like you wouldn’t believe. It lasted twenty-three days, and a man is supposed to die when he has a fever that high, but I didn’t. There were fifty cases of it on our ship. Twice a day they bathed me in sulfa drugs. They made a white paste out of it and put it in my ears. It finally eased off, but a doctor told me I’d have trouble with my ears all my life, and I did. If anybody’s got their back turned to me, I can hardly tell what they’re saying. There was a bunch of the boys that never got over it, but somehow I did.”

  His first assignment was the Marianas campaign. “I’ll never forget the racket those guns made on the Miami,” he said. “When we opened fire on the beach, the noise was almost unbearable. One young kid got so scared, he hid in a locker. He was only about seventeen, but he just couldn’t take it. They had to ship him back to the States.

  “Then came Saipan. We were shooting at targets on Saipan,” Saunders said, “and we zeroed in on one of the biggest towns there. There was a big sugar factory there with a railroad running through it, and there was a train pulling out of that factory, and I asked for permission to fire on that train. We hit it, and about fifty yards of those rails went straight up, and that engine rolled just like a football. Two of those five-inch shells hit it just about five or six feet from the track, and I mean it did some stopping.”

  Saunders and his gun mates also sank a Japanese ship. “I put 6
08 rounds in her—at least my three gun mounts did,” he said. “We were pretty sure it was a cruiser, but the reports varied, and it may have been a destroyer. I was mount captain, and I could see every one of those orange blossoms when those shells hit. It took about six minutes to sink.

  “When the Marines landed on Saipan we were close enough; we could see everything,” Saunders recalled. “And I saw 4,200 Marines fall to enemy bullets in the space of a few hours. There wasn’t a whole lot of cover when they went ashore, but by the time our howitzers and field artillery got through with them, they’d blown everything to pieces.”

  When the atomic bomb went off in Hiroshima ten months later the Miami was about a thousand miles away. “I remember that little tsunami or whatever they call it from the Hiroshima blast,” James said. “It was about fifteen feet high when it hit us. We called it a tidal wave.”

  Saunders made it back to the States after stops at Guam, Truk, Yukosuka, Japan, and, finally, Tokyo. “There wasn’t anything there,” he remembered. “The city was absolutely ruined. It was the stinkiest mess I’ve ever seen. The Tokyo River was running just as black as tar, and little kids by the thousands and thousands lined the bank of the river fishing, catching little fish about three inches long and eating them raw off the hook.”

  The Miami came home after that. By then Saunders was barely functioning. “They checked me over physically before they would discharge me,” he said. “They wanted to operate on me for this and operate on me for that. They wanted to put me in a hospital, but I said, ‘No way, I’m going home.’”

  When James got back to the States he went to another doctor, who told him, “I tell you what, Saunders, you’re in pretty good shape for a man about 135 years old.” He had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday, two days after they dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

  “It’s something I don’t think any human will ever get over,” James said decades later of his wartime experiences. “I still have ‘mad fits,’ I call them. I still have those nightmares. I had a dream one night that was the silliest dream I ever had. My wife punched me one night, woke me up in the middle of the dream. In the dream I was on my hands and knees in the bed, and I had a coat hanger in one hand and a handsaw in the other, and there were six Japanese Imperial Marines after me.”