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

by Bill Sloan

  EARLY ONE SUNDAY MORNING in 1945 Private First Class Raymond Renfro stepped off the train at Wichita Falls, Texas, and entered a world he hadn’t seen in a long time. His mother, father, and little brother were there on the station platform, and they were all shouting and waving.

  “Well, we all had to cry,” he remembered. “Especially my mother. I still had a patch over my right eye, but it was just good to be home. It was especially good to be alive. I was proud of what I did, and I’d do it again if I had to. I’m not ashamed of what I did. I did it for my family, for God and my country.”

  The patch over Renfro’s eye covered up the ravaged remains of the area where his right eye had been. But Ray was satisfied to have good vision in the left eye that remained. “I was lucky that my left eye had been real strong all these years,” he said. “I had 20/20 vision in it. I just felt lucky to be alive. So many of my friends didn’t make it, but I was lucky—a lot luckier than my brother.”

  Renfro’s older brother, Robert, was stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked it. He escaped and joined a guerrilla force. After being captured in early April 1942 he was put aboard a Hell Ship, where many Americans died on the journey to Japan. Ray’s parents didn’t know for many months whether Robert was alive.

  “He went through unbelievable torture, and he talked to me some about it, but he didn’t tell me nearly all about it,” Ray said, “and the truth of the matter is, I didn’t want him to. Robert died in July 2005. His health had broken down so totally, he just couldn’t make it any longer. He had heart surgery, and his kidneys were bad. He just wore out. But he didn’t hold any grudge against the Japanese. He traveled back over there and visited the place where their camp was.

  “He even talked with one of his guards, and that just somehow seemed to make everything all right,” said Ray, “and he wrote it all down. But then when he got it all down, he had so many bad thoughts in his mind that he had to have psychiatric help to get it under control.

  “I came home a totally changed person from the kid that went over there. I had nightmares all the time. I had some really, really awful bad dreams. There were so many of my friends that didn’t make it, and like so many other people have said before, ‘They are the real heroes.’ None of us were very old, and we took chances that nobody in our families had ever taken before. I’m just lucky to be alive.”

  AFTER I WAS wounded that last time, I had what I just called ‘the shakes.’ Even long after I was out of the Army, they scared the hell out of me,” recalled former Staff Sergeant Nick Grinaldo decades later. “And they just got worse and worse even, when I was back home in Troy. For years I’d wake up with these screaming fits. Christ, I got two Purple Hearts, and I cherish them both, but there were times when I’d give ’em both back if I could just get away from the shakes.

  “Was it posttraumatic stress disorder? I don’t know, but it’s something like that. I just don’t like to think too much about it because I still get them sometimes. I’ve been holding up pretty good, but you never know. I get the shakes, and I’m afraid I’ll have repercussions.”

  It took Grinaldo a good while to settle down when he returned home. “I had a reputation of being very temperamental—a very tough boy. I’d had to kill people who might have been just as nice a guy as I was, and it bothered me.

  “My wife put up with an awful lot,” he said. “I told her not to come near me when I was like that because I might kill her.”

  I’D SAY I HELD my feelings in a lot when I left the Marines,” said former 4th Division Marine Jack Gilbreath. “It wasn’t something I could talk about then, and I suppose it wasn’t a good thing. I’d say it took me maybe twenty years to get over it. It took me ten or twelve years to get over my nightmares. I’d gradually see something on the news, and I’d talk to my wife about it.”

  Years later one of the stories Gilbreath, who grew up in the Texas countryside, had in mind involved two young women that he and several other Marines encountered as the girls climbed a cliff, apparently thinking of ending their own lives.

  “They were beautiful girls, and they were just about my age—about eighteen or nineteen years old,” said the small-town Texas native. “They had no clothes on other than just bell-bottom Japanese pants, and they each had a little purse around their neck and under their arm.”

  Many Marines had had unfortunate experiences with people who hid grenades under their clothing, and one Marine apparently thought the girls might have had a grenade inside their purses, so he decided to take a look.

  “When he snatched one of the purses off the girl’s arm and opened it up,” Gilbreath said, “it was full of condoms. We realized that the girls were women of the evening. The Japanese called them ‘comfort women’ and had captured them from other places. Everyone laughed, but I found it sort of sad.” Gilbreath said he turned away, mildly embarrassed.

  “I think about the women and children who were killed, and I get too sentimental,” he said. “I wasn’t a really religious young man, but I thought about the persons I’d killed. That’s the reason you want to forget these things, and I have. I’ve overcome them, but sometimes I think I shouldn’t go to these reunions because they bring back a lot of old memories.

  “I wish the world could be more calm and figure out a way of settling differences instead of going to war,” said Gilbreath. “There’s got to be a better answer. These wars are just not getting it. It seems like one leads to another one. I’ve begun to believe that every president of this country seems to think they’ve got to have a war of their own to justify their existence.”

  THERE WERE BIG PARTIES to celebrate the peace in San Diego where I was,” recalled 2nd Marine Private First Class Olian Thomas Perry. “Right there in the middle of downtown, people were pulling their clothes off and going swimming in the fountain. I got so embarrassed, I went on back to camp. It got too rough for me, even after I’d had two or three drinks.

  “Yeah, the war was over, but you didn’t forget those boys that were with you who didn’t come back,” Perry said, “and you don’t forget your feelings about the Japanese. Those feelings were a real hard thing for me to deal with for a long time. I couldn’t even think of buying a Japanese car or anything like that. I’d think about the death march and the way the Japs treated the men they captured, and it tore me up.”

  For years after his discharge his dreams would jar him awake at night. “My wife said I had nightmares where I would get to hitting her,” he remembered. “Nightmares that the Japs were getting in my foxhole. I finally got over them, and I don’t have them anymore. Gradually, when I quit having nightmares, I kind of forgot it. I guess I came to the conclusion that the Japanese were just trying in their own way to survive too, and I managed to put it out of my mind.”

  WHAT DO YOU DO when you wake up with the cold sweats of what is now recognized as posttraumatic stress disorder some seventy years after it afflicted you? What do you do when a casual talk with a friend triggers an attack that makes you want to run away and hide someplace? Harold Haberman, who lives in Denver, knows firsthand how it feels.

  He talked about his ride onto the embattled Saipan beach aboard an amphibious tractor loaded down with .30-caliber machine gun bullets and bazooka ammunition. “All hell broke loose,” Haberman remembered. “All around me boats were being blown out of the water. I can’t tell you how frightening that was, but I got into shore. For two long nights without food or sleep, me and a buddy held our Ka-Bar knives at our chests and listened to the Japanese running everywhere around us. We could hear them coming, and I was ready, but I was lucky—none of them fell on me.”

  Several days later Haberman’s battalion was ordered to attack Mount Tapotchau, the heart of the Japanese artillery defense. In the midst of the battle he was told to remain with a supply of reserve ammunition cached in a huge hole in the ground. All day and all night artillery and mortar shells burst on every side of him.

  “A large chunk of steel missed
my head by inches and lodged in the dirt beside me,” Haberman said. “That night the Japanese counterattacked. I lost many of my close friends, and I still feel guilty today that I wasn’t with them.” A runner eventually came for him, and he loaded the ammunition onto a trailer and took it to the front lines, passing scores of dead and wounded.

  Out of a thousand men in Haberman’s battalion, only about two hundred survived the battle of Saipan.

  But a strange new enemy lay in wait for him when he reached the States. At first he did what many returning Marines did. When he docked at San Diego he felt the thrill of being “back in the good ol’ USA.” He boarded a bus for Denver and was soon reunited with Irene Roth, a girl he hadn’t seen in three years. They were married in December 1944, two days after Irene celebrated her twentieth birthday.

  But there were signs that something was amiss with Harold. It was hard for him to be around civilians. Then, in August 1945, President Truman announced the unconditional surrender of Japan. The war was over. He and Irene went to downtown Denver for the wild celebration. “I was treated like a king,” he said. But something was wrong.

  Haberman was called back to duty when the Korean War broke out. He trained replacement Marines headed for Korea. By the time the conflict ended, he’d spent a total of nine years in the Marine Corps. He and Irene had two sons, Paul and Dan, and Haberman found work as a house painter. In 1956 he founded his own painting and decorating company. The family moved into a new ranch house in south Denver, and everything seemed to be going great.

  But after an especially stressful time at work, Harold came down with an awful feeling he couldn’t explain: “The only way I can describe it is dread and fear, like something awful was going to happen. It would hit me hardest in the mornings. I would wake up in seizures, and Irene would hold me until I calmed down.”

  The condition grew steadily worse. He didn’t want to leave the house. He dreaded the thought of going to work. At home he would refuse to answer the door. “I would go with Irene shopping, and the walls would be closing in on me, and I’d get so scared I’d run away.”

  Although it was hard, Haberman took care of his family and his business, and he moved on to other things. He fell in love with the beauty of wood grain and made so many tables and lamps that he started selling them at local craft shows. He started making clocks. He polished precious stones. He built model airplanes. But nothing pushed the fear inside him away for good.

  He sought help from more than fifteen psychiatrists over a period of forty-plus years. They diagnosed depression and treated him with antidepressants that made his symptoms worse. Twice he ended up in a mental health hospital.

  Finally, during the Vietnam War public attention forced the military and medical communities to deal more directly with the psychological aftermaths of war. The old terms of shellshock and battle or combat fatigue were finally renamed posttraumatic stress disorder and recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a legitimate anxiety disorder in 1980.

  The turning point for Haberman came when he visited a Veteran Service Officer and rejected her observation that his problems were connected with his military service. Her response was firm and unequivocal. “I’m tired of you macho Marines coming in here with that bullshit!” she said. “When you hit that beach you were afraid. But you laid that fear aside, and because you were trained to be a Marine, you went and did what you were trained to do. Every morning when you had to get up out of that foxhole and go at it again, you laid that fear back—and now, in later years, the fear is there, and you don’t know why or where it is, but it’s making you afraid.” Haberman gradually improved and stopped having those dark episodes.

  But there were many thousands who weren’t so lucky.

  chapter 12

  Tinian and the B-29

  THE 8TH MARINES took over Ushi Point Airfield in the northern part of Tinian. In a few short days armies of Seabees—fifteen thousand of them—would tackle their largest job yet. When they were finished they had made Tinian the focal point of the largest assignment the Construction Battalion had ever handled. They hauled, blasted, and packed down enough coral to fill three Boulder Dams in what would become their most magnificent job yet—making the airfield home to about five hundred B-29s.

  Ushi Point Airfield and Gurguan Point Airfield, when enlarged and expanded, were renamed North Field and West Field, respectively. They became vital bases for the XX1 Bomber Command, which, during the spring and summer of 1945, would unleash its long-range bombers from Tinian against the Japanese homeland with devastating impact.

  WHEN YOUNG DAVID BRADEN was twelve years old and growing up in Dallas, his uncle was in the Army Air Corps at Randolph Field in San Antonio. “My uncle took me up in one of those little pea-shooter planes, and from that moment on, I knew I wanted to fly,” he said.

  A little later in life Braden was a student at North Texas Agricultural College, today the University of Texas at Arlington. He was planning to go on to Texas A&M to finish his degree program, but World War II came along, and it didn’t quite work out that way. “The day I turned eighteen I signed up for the Air Force Reserve and was called up the following February of 1943,” Braden recalled. “They sent me to the University of Tennessee and kept me there for two months, then I went to Nashville to be classified as a pilot, bombardier, or navigator.”

  The military needed pilots desperately because of the war raging in Africa and Europe, but Braden learned that he had some problems with his vision. He was found to be nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other. Essentially, they said, he was cockeyed and couldn’t fly a plane with that kind of eyesight. “It almost broke my heart when I found out I was being classified as a navigator,” he said.

  But Braden overcame his disappointment and went to preflight school and aerial gunner school at Fort Myers, Florida, where he won his gunner’s wings, went into advanced navigation, and graduated there to become a commissioned officer. “I was one of the top people in my class,” he said, “probably because of my engineering background.”

  The next stop on his list was Boca Raton, Florida, for a month in top secret training to become a radar bombardier. “When I say ‘top secret,’ they really meant it,” he said. “Our classrooms were surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with an armed guard on duty at the entry to the compound. Training flights were out over the ocean.” Then it was on to Clovis, New Mexico, where he joined the combat crew of Lieutenant Norman Westervelt and was introduced to a magnificent airplane called the B-29.

  Braden had never seen a B-29 before and hadn’t even known it existed because it was a super-secret airplane at that time. He found out that anytime a B-29 took off, the crew was fully armed, and a guard was aboard in case they had to make an emergency landing or anything unforeseen happened. “The B-29 was a high-tech, superb airplane,” Braden said. “But it had a lot of problems initially with overheating engines. Losing engines was very common.”

  So was ditching in the ocean. It happened to Braden on his third mission in a B-29. Two of his closest friends—Lieutenant Westervelt, who was piloting the plane, and Lieutenant Gorden Nedderson—were killed in the crash, but a Navy PBY (a light cargo plane with no armor) rescued Braden.

  “All this started changing rapidly when General Curtis LeMay was appointed chief of the XXI Bomber Command,” Braden said. “We called him ‘Old Iron Pants’ because he was a tough cookie. Curtis LeMay was the George Patton of the Air Force, but we respected him tremendously. There is no question that he put us on the path to winning the war.”

  LeMay saw the poor results the crews of B-29s were having and tried some experimentation. On one particular mission he mixed incendiary bombs with high-explosive bombs. He liked what he saw and decided to try a low-altitude mission. “We were going in at five thousand feet with 197 planes, and we were each going to carry ten tons of incendiary bombs. It was the first incendiary bombing raid on Tokyo,” Braden recalled. “This was the start of winning the war in the air
over Japan.”

  When the B-29s approached the city the pilots could see that the city was on fire. Pathfinder planes flying an hour ahead of the bombers had set fires on four corners of the bombing area to mark the spot. “But as we got closer and more and more planes dropped their bombs, a firestorm started,” Braden said. “Before it was over sixteen square miles of Tokyo were reduced to ashes. It was like looking at the mouth of hell.” That first fire raid on Tokyo killed 83,000 Japanese, and 1 million people were left homeless.

  “LeMay was ecstatic,” Braden remembered. “We flew twenty-four of those fire raids in all. I flew on seventeen of them. The planes from the 313th Wing on Tinian started an operation called Operation Starvation. They just about stopped all the shipping that took place in Japan. The Japanese couldn’t get any raw material at all and very limited food or medicine.

  “In the meantime we were going up in daylight and dropping leaflets on ten targeted cities which said, ‘We advise you to plead with your rulers to capitulate and unconditionally surrender, and we advise you to evacuate your town because we are coming up here Sunday afternoon at two o’clock and we are going to burn it to the ground.’

  “We did exactly that. I don’t know whether they evacuated or not, but we performed as scheduled.”

  THE NATION’S SCIENTIFIC profession went to the Army,” said Philip Morrison, a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project helping to build the plutonium bomb, the one dropped on Hiroshima, and who was now at Tinian to assemble it with a team that included Albert Einstein, the pacifist, as its head. “We beat on the doors and said we must be allowed to make this weaponry or we’re going to lose the war. Once we did that, we didn’t stop. I didn’t stop. I worked a seventy-hour week making bombs.”