July 7, 1944. Two understrength battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment, roughly 1,100 men of the 27th Infantry Division, dug in on the Tanapag Plain on Saipan’s northwest coast with a gap between them that their commander had asked to have closed. His request was denied. At 04:45, approximately 4,300 Japanese soldiers hit that gap.

By evening, 4,311 of them were dead. 2,295 in front of the American line, 2,016 behind it where the wave had broken through and been destroyed by Marine howitzer crews firing with time fuses set to 4/10 of a second. The 105th’s two battalions suffered over 900 casualties. In the first battalion, one officer survived unwounded.

 Three men from that single morning earned the Medal of Honor. All three posthumously. Saipan was the island Japan could not afford to lose. 1,300 mi south of Tokyo, close enough for the new B-29 Superfortress to reach the home islands and return without refueling. The Imperial government called it part of the Zettai Kokuboken, the absolute national defense zone.

By the first week of July 1944, 3 weeks into the American invasion, that zone was collapsing. The island narrows as it runs north. By July 6, the advancing American line had pinched the 2nd Marine Division out of the fight entirely, leaving the western corridor, the Tanapag Plain, to the US Army’s 27th Infantry Division.

Flat, cane-covered ground squeezed between the beach and a limestone escarpment, a corridor, a funnel. Any Japanese force moving south from the pocket near Makunsha had exactly one path, and it ran straight through the 105th Infantry Regiment. The 27th Division was already poisoned from within. On June 24, Marine Lieutenant General Holland Smith had relieved the division’s commander, Major General Ralph Smith, in the middle of combat.

The worst interservice feud of the Pacific War. The mutual distrust that followed meant that when Holland Smith personally warned the new commander, Major General George Griner, that a mass attack was coming down that plane, the warning landed in a command climate where nobody trusted anybody. Lieutenant Colonel William J.

 O’Brien, a Troy, New York man who had enlisted in the 105th Infantry at 18 in 1917, left-handed, known for wearing his pistol in a shoulder holster under his right armpit, commanded the First Battalion. He saw the gap between his battalion and the Second Battalion to his left. He requested reinforcements. He was told none were available.

Two reserve battalions sat within 2,000 yd. They were not committed. The division’s chief Nisei interpreter, Second Lieutenant Benjamin Hazard, had been warning all day that this was different from the small unit banzai probes they had faced before. “This is not just yelling and screaming and coming in,” Hazard told his superiors.

“The singing, they know they’re going to die.” Division did not act. The gap stayed open. And on the other side of it, in caves near Makunouchi, a dying Japanese general was writing his last order. Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito, commander of the 43rd division, was a cavalry officer, not a combat leader by training or temperament.

Born in 1890, wounded by shrapnel earlier in the campaign, too sick to stand for long. His army had been reduced to a pocket on the island’s northwest corner. No ammunition worth counting. No artillery. No resupply. No hope of reinforcement. That morning, from his cave command post, he dictated the order that would send his men to die.

Whether we attack or whether we stay where we are, there is only death. However, in death, there is life. Every soldier was to take seven Americans with him. >> Saito himself was too feeble to lead the charge. He would finish himself days later, seppuku, on the floor of a cave, facing east toward the Imperial Palace.

Near Makunouchi, around 0400 on July 7, the force assembled. Approximately 4,300 men. This was not a military formation. It was a death procession. Walking wounded on crutches, stretcher cases who could still grip a grenade, naval personnel, construction laborers, civilians, three tanks, some rifles and pistols, officers carrying katanas, bayonets lashed to bamboo poles, kitchen knives, clubs, rocks.

Many, especially the laborers, had drunk sake and beer to steel themselves for what they already knew was coming. Sergeant Takeo Yamauchi of the 136th Infantry Regiment, a former student who had read Marx and studied Russian, described the logic that held them. If you were taken alive as a prisoner, you could never face your own family.

They’d been sent off by their neighbors with cheers of banzai. How could they now go home? Yamauchi told his two men there was no point in dying on Saipan, that Japan would lose the war. Their response, Squad leader, you’re talking like a traitor. 50 yards behind the American foxhole line, the Second Battalion’s aid station was being run by a man who had never wanted to be a doctor.

Captain Ben Solomon, a dentist from Milwaukee, an Eagle Scout, a USC graduate, had been drafted in 1940 and forced into the Army Dental Corps when all he wanted was an infantry commission. What he did in the next 3 hours would take 58 years to be recognized. That story is coming. At 0445, the wave hit. First Sergeant Mario Ochinario of the First Battalion, 105th Infantry, heard it before he saw it.

We began to hear this buzz. It was the damndest noise I ever heard, and it kept getting louder and louder. Then the darkness filled with bodies. Lieutenant Junior Grade C.J. Blank, the naval gunnery liaison, described a force so great it was impossible to estimate, rushing down both sides of the narrow-gauge sugar railroad, packed so closely the Americans hardly needed to aim.

Major Edward McCarthy, commanding the Second Battalion, said later it reminded him of a cattle stampede in the movies. Only the Japs just kept coming and coming. I didn’t think they’d ever stop. The mass struck the seam between the two battalions and tore it open. Forward positions were overrun in minutes. Communications severed.

 Both battalions isolated, fighting blind. O’Brien did what he had always done. He strode up and down the line with a pistol in each hand, firing into the wave, refusing to leave. When wounded, he refused evacuation. When his pistol ammunition ran out, he climbed onto a jeep-mounted .50 caliber machine gun and kept firing.

His last command to his men, “Don’t give them a damned inch.” When last seen alive, he was standing upright on that jeep, firing into the mass that was swallowing his battalion. His body was found surrounded by the enemy he had killed. Nearby, Sergeant Thomas Baker of Company A, wounded by grenade shrapnel, refused evacuation, fired until his rifle was beaten useless in hand-to-hand fighting, then asked to be propped against a tree with a pistol and its last eight rounds.

His body was found in the same position, gun empty, eight dead Japanese soldiers in front of him. The Japanese broke through and crashed into the gun lines of the third battalion, 10th Marines, howitzer positions 500 yards behind the infantry. Battery H set time fuses to 4/10 of a second. The shells detonated almost as they cleared the muzzle.

105-mm howitzers converted into giant shotguns, firing at point-blank range into a packed human mass. They destroyed at least one tank. When the gun pits themselves were overrun, the Marine crews pulled the firing locks from their howitzers, denying them to the enemy, fell back to Battery G’s position, and fought with rifles and pistols among the gun trails.

Major William Crouch, the battalion commander, was killed in the hand-to-hand fighting. 322 Japanese dead were counted in front of the battalion’s position alone. The geography that made the gap so dangerous also sealed the attackers’ fate. Escarpment on one side, ocean on the other. The corridor compressed 4,000 men into a kill zone where every artillery round hit something.

The same funnel that let the charge punch through the American line also prevented it from spreading. The math was merciless. And at the aid station, Captain Ben Salomon was earning the medal that would take half a century to arrive. When the Japanese broke through the perimeter and reached his tent, 30 wounded soldiers lay inside.

Salomon shot the first enemy soldier who was bayoneting a wounded man, killed two more coming through the front of the tent. When four crawled under the canvas walls, he kicked the knife out of one man’s hand, shot another, bayoneted a third, and butted the fourth with his rifle stock. He ordered the wounded evacuated to the rear, then he stayed.

He took over a .30 caliber machine gun whose four-man crew was dead, and he held. When the 27th Division’s historian found Salomon’s body days later, 98 enemy dead lay piled in front of his position. He had repositioned the gun four times because the bodies kept blocking his field of fire. His own body bore 76 bullet wounds.

Medical examiners estimated up to 24 had been received while he was still alive. His Medal of Honor was rejected at the time as a medical officer wearing the Red Cross brassard, he could not technically bear arms under the Geneva Convention. The recommendation was resubmitted in 1951, again in 1969, again in the late 1990s.

Finally, in 2002, 58 years after his death, President George W. Bush presented Captain Salomon’s Medal of Honor to the USC School of Dentistry. He remains the only dentist ever to receive it. The cost was staggering on both sides. The first and second battalions of the 105th Infantry suffered 406 killed and 512 wounded, roughly 918 casualties from two understrength battalions, effectively destroyed.

In the first battalion, only one officer emerged unwounded, Lieutenant John Mulhern of Company B. In the second, Major McCarthy survived, but every member of his staff and every company commander was killed or wounded. The third battalion, 10th Marines, took 136 casualties, including its commander. Total American losses for the morning, approximately 1,000 killed and wounded, the heaviest single day toll any American regiment absorbed in the Pacific Theater.

And it changed nothing. Major Hoshida Hiyoshi, a captured intelligence officer of the 43rd Division, said it plainly. They knew at the outset that they had no hope of succeeding. They simply felt that it was better to die that way and take some of the enemy with them than to be holed up in caves and killed. By 1800 hours, every yard of lost ground had been retaken.

Two days later, Saipan was declared secure. One officer survived the charge by playing dead, Captain Sakae Oba of the 18th Infantry Regiment, a former school teacher. He gathered 46 soldiers and 200 civilians and held out in Saipan’s rugged interior for 512 days, surrendering in December 1945, 3 months after Japan’s formal capitulation.

The loss of Saipan brought down Prime Minister Tojo within 11 days. >> Vice Admiral Shigeru Yoshimiwa said simply, “Our war was lost with the loss of Saipan.” By November, B-29 Superfortresses were flying from Isley Field to bomb Tokyo. From those same Mariana airfields would eventually fly the Enola Gay. After the island was declared secure, Marines advancing toward the northern cliffs watched the final consequence of the ideology that had sent 4,000 men into the guns on the Tanapag Plain.

At Banzai Cliff and Suicide Cliff, entire families joined hands and stepped off the edge. Parents threw children before following them over. PFC Edward Carrillo I seen what I believe was the first woman that jumped off of there. I know there was more following. There was no gunfire. They just jumped off the cliff.

800 to more than 1,000 civilians died at Marpi Point alone. The Tanapag Plain is quiet now. The sugar railroad is gone. The cane fields are gone. The gap in the line that was never plugged has been overgrown for 80 years. What happened there on the morning of July 7th, 1944 lasted 15 hours and killed more than 5,000 men and changed nothing except to confirm in the plainest possible terms what the rest of the Pacific war would cost.