The sticky tropical air of Saipan hangs heavy with the metallic scent of blood and cordite as Captain Ben Salomon wipes sweat from his brow with a blood stained surgical towel.
It’s 11:30 p.m.
on July 6th, 1944.
And inside his pyramidal aid station tent, just 50 yards behind the 105th Infantry’s frontline foxholes, wounded American soldiers lie on stretchers and the muddy ground, their groans mixing with the distant sound of Japanese voices echoing through the darkness.
Salomon adjusts his wire rimmed glasses and bends over another wounded GI.
his dentist’s steady hands now saving lives instead of fixing cavities.
But tonight feels different.
The Japanese voices carry a strange urgency, and the usual sporadic rifle fire has been replaced by an ominous shuffling.
Thousands of boots moving across coral and volcanic rock.
Doc, you hear that? whispers a wounded soldier from the 27th Infantry Division.
His New York accent cutting through the humid air.
Sounds like the whole damn Japanese army is moving up there.
Salomon pauses, listening.
Beyond the ridge, sake bottles clink like windchimes as Japanese officers distribute final rations of liquid courage to their men.
The sound of metal on metal, swords being drawn from sheaths, creates an almost musical rhythm in the pre-dawn darkness.
What the Americans don’t yet realize is that 4,000 desperate Japanese soldiers are gathering for Gyokusai, the honorable destruction that would rather embrace death than surrender.
Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien crouches in his foxhole 250 yards from the beach, studying the dangerous gap between his first battalion and Major Edward McCarthy’s second battalion through his field glasses.
He’s requested reinforcements twice.
None are available.
In desperation, he’s positioned his anti-tank weapons to cover the hundredy opening.
But deep in his gut, O’Brien knows it won’t be enough.
Sir, his radio operator whispers.
Artillery is asking for final coordinates.
3 m offshore, the USS Birmingham’s radio room crackles with precise calculations.
American artillery observers are fine-tuning what they call time on target, a revolutionary coordination technique that synchronizes multiple artillery batteries to deliver devastating concentrated firepower at precisely the same moment.
It’s mathematical warfare turning chaos into lethal precision.
But hidden in caves and spider holes across northern Saipan, General Yoshitsuguid’s remaining forces are preparing for something the Americans have never experienced on this scale.
The largest bonsai charge in Pacific War history.
Every able-bodied man, soldiers, sailors, even civilians with bamboo spears, will charge at 4:45 a.m.
in a human wave designed to overwhelm American positions through sheer desperate courage.
As Captain Salomon returns to treating a Marine with shrapnel wounds, he has no idea that in five hours his steady dentist hands will be gripping a machine gun surrounded by 98 enemy bodies.
Tonight, American technological coordination will collide with Japanese spiritual determination in the most one-sided massacre of the Pacific War.
The question isn’t whether the Japanese will charge.
It’s whether American artillery coordination can turn what should be a terrifying assault into systematic annihilation.
The humid darkness throbs with whispered prayers and the metallic click of rifle bolts as two fundamentally different military philosophies prepare for collision.
In the American foxholes, soldiers adjust their equipment with the methodical precision of industrial warfare, checking ammunition counts, testing radio frequencies, coordinating overlapping fields of fire.
300 yards away, Japanese soldiers kneel in prayer circles, writing final letters to families they’ll never see again.
Their faces lit by the glow of seay bottles passed from hand to trembling hand.
Major Edward McCarthy huddles over his field radio, his voice cutting through static.
Fire direction center, this is Tango 26.
Request confirmation on concentration Charlie 7.
The response comes back immediately.
Coordinates locked.
Firing solutions calculated.
Multiple battery positions synchronized for maximum effectiveness.
This is the American way of war.
technological coordination turning individual units into a single devastating weapon system.
But the Japanese are preparing for something entirely different.
In a limestone cave 500 yardds north of the American lines, General Cido’s final conference is ending.
The wounded feeble commander has chosen death over defeat, but not before ordering every surviving defender to participate in one final Gyokusai.
Captain Sakai Oba checks his sword one last time.
He and 200 other officers will lead the charge knowing they’re marching towards certain death.
The password tonight, Oba tells his men, is seven lives for one’s country.
Among the assembling Japanese forces, Sergeant Teo Yamuchi stares at the sake bottle in his hands, knowing this liquid courage won’t stop American bullets.
A former Russian language student who secretly admires Soviet communism, Yamuchi understands military tactics well enough to recognize suicide when he sees it.
But Bushidto code demands he charge anyway.
Honor before survival, spiritual purity over tactical wisdom.
In his aid station, Captain Salomon suddenly notices the change in sound.
The random Japanese chatter has organized into rhythmic chanting.
Tenno bonsai.
Tenno bonsai.
Long live the emperor.
The voices are getting closer and there are thousands of them.
Get those wounded men ready to move.
Salomon orders his medics.
His instincts honed by months of frontline surgery are screaming danger.
Three miles behind the front lines.
American artillery crews are performing calculations that would revolutionize warfare.
Battery commanders study their firing tables, calculating precise flight times for shells fired from different distances.
When the call comes, every artillery piece from 75 m os pack howitzers to massive 100 mer guns will deliver their shells to arrive at exactly the same instant.
It’s called Time on Target, and it transforms scattered artillery into a single devastating weapon.
Artillery observer Captain Louie Arian crouches in a forward observation post, field telephone pressed to his ear.
Bernie, you getting the coordinates? He asks Captain Bernard Toth.
Because when this thing kicks off, I’m going to need you to drop it right on top of us.
How close? Toth’s voice crackles through the static.
Danger close.
75 yards from friendly positions.
The mathematics of death are being calculated in real time.
Shell trajectories, blast radi, fragmentation patterns, all coordinated to create an invisible wall of steel and high explosive that will make the front lines of Saipan the most lethal 1,000 yards in the Pacific.
Meanwhile, the Japanese assembly continues with religious fervor.
Walking wounded lean on bamboo crutches, their bandages soaked with blood and sweat.
Civilians, men, women, even children, clutch sharpened sticks and broken bottles, their eyes wide with propaganda induced terror of American brutality.
They believe capture means torture and death, making this suicidal charge their only honorable option.
The contrast couldn’t be starker.
American preparation focuses on coordination, communication, and technological advantage.
Radio operators synchronize watches to the second.
Artillery crews adjust elevation with mathematical precision.
And infantry coordinates interlocking fields of fire.
Every element works together like components in a vast lethal machine.
Japanese preparation is spiritual and emotional.
Officers burn personal letters and family photographs.
Soldiers distribute their few remaining possessions and everyone participates in final prayers to ancestors.
They’re not preparing for battle.
They’re preparing for sacred death, believing their sacrifice will somehow delay American victory and honor their emperor.
At 3:30 a.m., the Japanese begin their final approach.
Through his night glasses, Lieutenant Colonel O’Brien watches thousands of shapes moving through the darkness, a human river flowing toward his thin defensive line.
The sound is unlike anything he’s experienced.
The shuffle of feet, the clink of equipment, and underneath it all, a low humming as thousands of men chant prayers for honorable death.
“Jesus Christ,” O’Brien whispers to his radio operator.
“There’s got to be 4,000 of them.” His message reaches every American position within minutes, triggering the most precise artillery coordination in Pacific War history.
Battery commanders check their watches, adjust final calculations, and wait for the signal that will turn mathematical theory into devastating reality.
In his aid station, Captain Salomon hears the approaching chant growing louder, his hands steady as he loads another wounded soldier onto a stretcher, but his mind is racing.
The dentist who wanted to be an infantry officer is about to get his wish in the most horrific way possible.
The stage is set for collision.
Japanese spiritual determination versus American technological coordination.
4,000 desperate men charging toward mathematical annihilation.
At 4:44 a.m., everything changes.
The explosion of sound at 4:45 a.m.
shatters the tropical night like the world is ending.
Tinoa Banzai.
Tinoa Banzai.
4,000 Japanese voices scream in unison as the largest banzai charge in Pacific War history erupts from the darkness.
Officers wave their ancestral swords above their heads.
Their silhouettes backlit by the first hint of dawn, leading waves of desperate soldiers walking wounded on crutches and terrified civilians clutching bamboo spears.
Major Edward McCarthy, commanding the second battalion, 105th infantry, watches the human tsunami approach his positions and immediately grabs his radio.
“It looks like a cattle stampede from a western movie,” he shouts into the handset.
Except these japs just keep coming and coming.
The first wave hits the gap between O’Brien’s and McCarthy’s battalions like water flowing through a broken dam.
Japanese soldiers pour through the hundredyard opening, screaming, firing from the hip, bayonets glinting in the pre-dawn light.
Lieutenant Colonel O’Brien stands in his foxhole, a pistol in each hand, shouting encouragement to his men as muzzle flashes light up his face like a deadly strobe light.
Hold your ground.
Don’t give them an inch.
But this isn’t just chaos.
This is American coordination in action.
Captain Bernard Toth’s voice crackles through the artillery radio network.
Fire mission concentration.
Charlie 7.
All batteries standby for time on target.
Across three miles of Saipan’s western coastline, 18 American artillery batteries receive identical firing solutions.
Mathematics calculated in advance now becomes devastating reality.
Battery commanders check their synchronized watches.
Time on target in 30 seconds, 15 seconds.
5 4 3 2 1 fire.
The night explodes.
144 artillery shells from 75 mm pack howitzers to massive 155 meter guns launch simultaneously from positions scattered across southern Saipan.
Different trajectories, different flight times, but identical arrival time.
Exactly 47 seconds after launch, every shell will detonate in a concentrated area just 75 yards in front of American positions.
Tech Sergeant John Picowski, crouched in his foxhole as Japanese soldiers stream past, watches in amazement.
It reminded me of a circus ground or maybe Yankee Stadium.
The crowd just milled out on the field, pushing and shoving and yelling.
There were so many of them you could just shut your eyes and pull the trigger and you’d be bound to hit three or four with one shot.
Then the American artillery arrives.
The concentrated barrage doesn’t just kill, it disintegrates.
High explosive shells detonate in perfect synchronization, creating an invisible wall of steel fragments and concussion that shreds everything within a 200y radius.
Japanese soldiers charging at full speed simply vanish in the explosions.
Others are hurled through the air like ragdolls, their screams lost in the deafening roar of coordinated destruction.
But still they come.
Wounded Japanese soldiers crawl forward on their bellies, dragging rifles and grenades.
A group of civilians, women and children forced into the charge, stumble through the smoke and carnage, their eyes wide with terror and propaganda induced determination.
American Marines trained to show no mercy in combat, hesitate for precious seconds as they realize they’re firing at families.
Captain Lewis Arian screams into his radio, “For God’s sake, Bernie, get that artillery closer.
I’m already placing shells within 150 yards of your position.
Make it 75 yards right on top of us.
The second artillery barrage arrives with even deadlier precision.
Shells explode so close to American positions that dirt and shrapnel rain down on their own foxholes.
The mathematical perfection of American coordination creates a meat grinder that transforms human courage into systematic slaughter.
Behind the main Japanese assault, Captain Sakai Oba leads 200 officers in a secondary charge.
Their swords raised like medieval knights.
These are Japan’s military elite.
Career soldiers with decades of training.
Samurai descendants carrying family blades centuries old.
They charge into the American artillery barrage, believing their spiritual purity will somehow overcome mathematics and steel.
They’re wrong.
Meanwhile, at the second battalion aid station, Captain Ben Salomon hears screaming from inside his tent.
A Japanese soldier is crawled under the canvas wall and bayonetted a wounded American lying helpless on a stretcher.
Without hesitation, the dentist grabs a wounded solders’s M1 carbine and shoots the intruder dead.
Two more Japanese soldiers charge through the tent entrance.
Salomon, moving with the reflexes of the infantry training he’d begged for, swings the rifle like a baseball bat, smashing the wooden stock against the first attacker’s skull.
The rifle breaks apart in his hands.
He grabs another weapon, shoots the second soldier, and bayonets a third who’s crawling under the tent wall.
“Everybody out!” Salomon shouts to his medics.
“Get the wounded back to regimental aid station.
I’ll hold them off.
Four more Japanese soldiers crawl under the tent flaps.
The dentist who wanted to be a warrior kills them with rifle, bayonet, and bare hands.
His wire- rimmed glasses are shattered.
His shirt is torn and blood both his own and the enemies covers his hands.
Outside the tent, the Japanese charge has penetrated deeper into American positions than anyone thought possible.
Despite the devastating artillery, sheer numbers and suicidal determination have carried hundreds of attackers past the front lines.
They’re now assaulting the Marine artillery batteries positioned behind the infantry.
Marine gunners abandon their normal indirect fire missions and start shooting their 105 mm howitzers point blank into the oncoming waves of Japanese troops.
line of sight directly into the oncoming waves, as one survivor later described it.
The massive artillery pieces designed to lob shells miles away become the world’s largest shotguns, firing high explosive rounds directly into human targets at ranges of less than 100 yards.
The sound is indescribable.
The crack of rifle fire, the boom of pointblank artillery, the screams of wounded and dying men in two languages, and underneath it all, the continuous chanting of tenno hikabanzai from Japanese soldiers who keep charging even as their comrades are blown apart around them.
Captain Salomon emerges from his aid station to find Japanese soldiers overrunning the entire second battalion front.
His medics have evacuated the wounded, but the enemy is everywhere.
Without hesitation, he runs to a 30 caliber water cooled machine gun whose crew has been killed and begins firing steady, methodical bursts into the attacking Japanese.
The dentist has become a one-man fortress.
For the next six hours, as dawn breaks over Saipan and the American artillery continues its systematic destruction of the Japanese charge, Ben Salomon moves his machine gun four separate times to maintain the best fields of fire.
Each time he’s wounded, bullet holes, bayonet cuts, shrapnel wounds, but he keeps firing until his ammunition runs out and Japanese soldiers finally overwhelm his position.
By 10:30 a.m., the largest banzai charge in Pacific War history is over.
The mathematical precision of American artillery coordination has turned Japanese spiritual determination into the most one-sided massacre of the Pacific conflict.
The coastal plane north of the 105th Infantry’s positions is carpeted with 4,311 Japanese bodies, soldiers, sailors, and civilians who believed honor was more important than survival.
American coordination had defeated Japanese courage so completely that banzai charges would never again be used as a primary tactic.
The age of samurai warfare died in the artillery barrage that turn mathematics into mass destruction.
When the smoke clears and the final counts are made, the numbers tell a story of technological evolution written in blood and mathematics.
4,31 Japanese bodies lie scattered across the coral beaches and volcanic slopes of northern Saipan.
the spiritual warriors of an ancient military culture systematically destroyed by American industrial warfare.
The cost to the defenders, 406 Americans killed and 512 wounded.
Devastating losses that nonetheless pale beside the Japanese annihilation.
Major General George W.
Grryer Jr., The 27th Infantry Division Commander leads the grim counting parties across the battlefield.
Near the second battalion aid station, they discover a scene that will haunt American military history.
Captain Ben Salomon’s body lies bent over the barrel of his machine gun.
His ammunition completely exhausted, surrounded by 98 Japanese corpses arranged in neat rows like some macob testament to precision marksmanship.
The area to the front of the weapon was covered with enemy dead.
Chief warrant officer Steven Burns later testifies in some instances three and four bodies high.
By following the trail of spent cartridges and the pattern of bodies, they determined that Salomon moved his machine gun four separate times before running out of ammunition, fighting through 76 bullet wounds, 24 of which occurred before his death.
The dentist, who wanted to be an infantry officer, had gotten his wish in the most horrific way possible.
But Salomon’s heroism reveals a bitter irony of military bureaucracy.
When combat historian Captain Edmund Love recommends him for the Medal of Honor, General Grryer rejects the nomination, believing that Salomon violated the Geneva Convention by wielding weapons as a medical officer.
For 58 years, the most lethal dentist in American military history remains unhonored.
His sacrifice buried in bureaucratic misunderstanding.
It takes until May 1st, 2002 and multiple advocacy campaigns by fellow USC dental school graduates before President George W.
Bush finally presents Salomon’s Medal of Honor in the White House Rose Garden.
He remains the only dentist in American military history to receive the nation’s highest decoration for valor.
The broader impact of July 7th, 1944 reverberates far beyond individual heroism.
The systematic destruction of the largest banzai charge in history marks the definitive end of Japan’s spiritual approach to warfare.
Never again will Japanese commanders attempt to overcome American technological superiority through mass suicidal attacks.
The mathematics of coordinated artillery have proven more powerful than centuries of samurai tradition.
American time ontarget coordination, the technique that synchronized multiple artillery batteries to deliver simultaneous devastating firepower, becomes the template for modern military doctrine.
What worked on Caipan’s coral beaches will evolve into the precision warfare of the 21st century where satelliteg guided munitions and computercoordinated strikes can destroy targets with mathematical certainty.
For the surviving Japanese defenders, the psychological impact is equally profound.
Sergeant Teo Yamochi, who played dead in his foxhole during the charge, later reflects, “We were real soldiers, real men.
We did not want to be slaughtering what was left of the women, children, elderly, and infirm left in Japan.” The systematic destruction of their comrades forces even dedicated Japanese soldiers to question the wisdom of spiritual warfare against technological superiority.
The strategic consequences prove equally decisive.
With Saipan secured by July 9th, American B29 superfortresses begin operating from the island’s airfields, bringing Japan’s home islands within bombing range for the first time.
The coordinated artillery barrage that destroyed the Banzai charge directly enables the bombing campaigns that will ultimately force Japan’s surrender.
Modern military analysts studying the Battle of Saipan identify July 7th, 1944 as the moment when industrial warfare definitively defeated traditional military culture.
The same technological coordination principles, synchronized timing, mathematical precision, overwhelming concentrated firepower now guide everything from GPSguided artillery to drone swarm attacks.
Yet the human cost remains staggering.
The Japanese civilians forced to participate in the bonsai charge, men, women, and children terrorized by propaganda into believing American capture meant torture and death, represent warfare’s ultimate tragedy.
Their bodies, mixed among the soldiers on Saipan’s beaches, remind us that technological superiority doesn’t eliminate war’s fundamental horror.
It only makes the killing more efficient.
Captain Ben Salomon’s machine gun, surrounded by 98 enemy bodies, stands as a testament to individual courage within systematic warfare.
The dentist who became a warrior proved that even in an age of technological coordination, personal heroism still matters.
His 58-year wait for recognition reminds us that bureaucracy often fails to understand the very heroism it’s supposed to honor.
The bonsai charge died on Saipan’s coral beaches killed by American mathematics.
But the human stories of courage, sacrifice, and the terrible cost of war continue to resonate 80 years later, reminding us that behind every military technological advancement lie individual human beings who paid the ultimate price for victory.
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