At 4:45 in the morning on July 7th, 1944, Private Thomas Baker lay in his foxhole on the Tanipag plane of Saipan, watching a wave of shadows pour out of the jungle 300 yards ahead.
28 years old, 3 weeks of combat on this island, and now staring at the largest suicide charge of the entire Pacific War.
Between 3,000 and 5,000 Japanese soldiers were running directly at his position.
The 105th Infantry Regiment had already lost dozens of men in the past 3 weeks.
By sunrise, they would lose hundreds more.
Baker had joined the army from Troy, New York back in October of 1940.
He had spent nearly 4 years training, waiting, preparing for a war that seemed impossibly far away.
Now that war had found him on a volcanic island 8,000 m from home and it was coming at him with fixed bayonets and sakefueled screams.
The battle of Saipan had begun 3 weeks earlier on June 15th when the second and fourth marine divisions hit the beaches on the island’s western shore.
The army’s 27th infantry division landed the next day.
Their mission was simple on paper.
capture the island, destroy the Japanese garrison, build airfields close enough to strike the Japanese home islands with B-29 bombers.
The reality was anything but simple.
The Japanese had 30,000 troops dug into caves and bunkers across the island.
They had artillery.
They had machine guns.
They had orders to fight to the last man, and they intended to follow those orders.
By early July, American forces had pushed the Japanese into the northern tip of Saipan.
The enemy had nowhere left to retreat.
Their backs were against the sea.
Supplies were gone.
Reinforcements were not coming.
The Imperial Japanese Navy had been shattered in the Battle of the Philippine Sea just 2 weeks earlier.
Three aircraft carriers sunk.
Over 400 planes destroyed.
The Japanese garrison on Saipan was completely alone.
On the evening of July 6th, Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saitto, the Japanese commander, gathered his remaining officers.
He had 4,000 men left.
Most were wounded.
Many had no ammunition.
Some carried only sharpened bamboo sticks or bayonets lashed to wooden poles.
Seaitto gave the order for Giokusai, a final suicide attack.
Every man would charge the American lines and kill as many enemy soldiers as possible before dying.
There would be no surrender.
There would be no prisoners.
There would be only death.
That night, Silito ate his final meal and committed ritual suicide.
Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the man who had commanded the attack on Pearl Harbor, shot himself in the head.
The two highest ranking Japanese officers on Saipan were dead before the attack even began.
Their men would follow them into death by dawn.
The American soldiers on the front line knew something was coming.
They could hear it.
Movement in the darkness, bottles clinking, voices rising.
The Japanese were drinking sake and working themselves into a frenzy.
Some American soldiers who had survived earlier bonsai charges knew the pattern.
The noise would build for hours, then silence, then the screaming would start.
Private Baker was positioned with company A of the 105th Infantry Regiment.
His battalion commander was Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien, a fellow New Yorker from Troy who had served in the National Guard since the First World War.
The 105th was a New York unit filled with men from the Albany and Troy areas.
Many of them had known each other before the war.
They had trained together, shipped out together, fought together.
Now they would face the largest human wave attack of the Pacific War together.
The 105th held a position on the coastal plane near Tanipag Village.
The first battalion under O’Brien was dug in about 250 yardds from the beach.
The second battalion under Major Edward McCarthy held the line to their right.
Between them, they had roughly a thousand men.
The Japanese were sending four to five times that number directly at them.
What the men of the 105th did not know was that Japanese reconnaissance patrols had found a 500yard gap between the two battalions.
The enemy would hit that weak point with everything they had.
Baker had already proven himself in the previous weeks of fighting.
On June 19th, when his company was pinned down by Japanese machine gun fire, he had grabbed the bazooka and charged forward alone.
He crossed a 100 yards of open ground under direct fire and destroyed the enemy position with a single shot.
His company advanced because of that one act.
Days later, he had surprised two fortified enemy positions containing 12 Japanese soldiers, including two officers.
He killed all of them by himself.
Then he found six more enemy soldiers who had infiltrated behind American lines.
He killed them, too.
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Back to Baker.
The night of July 6th turned into the morning of July 7th.
The saki bottles stopped clinking.
The voices went quiet.
For a moment, the Tanipag plane fell completely silent.
Then the screaming started.
Thousands of voices, one word, bonsai.
And the darkness ahead of Baker’s foxhole erupted with muzzle flashes and running shadows.
The largest suicide charge of the Pacific War was heading straight for him.
And he had no idea that within hours he would be asking his fellow soldiers for a pistol with eight bullets.
The first wave hit the American lines like a breaking dam.
Japanese soldiers poured through the gap between the two battalions and kept running.
They did not stop to take cover.
They did not stop to aim.
They simply ran forward, screaming, firing, dying, and being replaced by more men behind them.
Major Edward McCarthy of the second battalion would later describe it as watching a cattle stampede.
The camera is in a hole in the ground and you see the herd coming and then they leap up and over you and are gone.
only the Japanese just kept coming and coming.
He did not think they would ever stop.
Within the first 30 minutes, the American perimeter began to collapse.
Japanese soldiers were inside the lines, behind the lines, everywhere.
The organized defense turned into dozens of isolated fights.
Small groups of American soldiers firing in all directions.
Hand-to-h hand combat in foxholes, bayonets and rifle butts, and bare hands.
Baker opened fire with his M1 Garand rifle as the first attackers reached his position.
The M1 held eight rounds in its internal clip.
He fired, reloaded, fired again.
Japanese soldiers fell 5 yards in front of him.
10 yards.
Some got closer.
The muzzle flashes lit up faces twisted with rage and alcohol and the absolute certainty that they were about to die for their emperor.
The noise was overwhelming.
Thousands of men screaming bonsai, rifles cracking, machine guns hammering, grenades exploding, men crying out in English and Japanese.
The Tanipag plane had become a slaughterhouse in the pre-dawn darkness.
Lieutenant Colonel O’Brien moved up and down the line, refusing to take cover.
He carried a pistol in each hand, firing at any Japanese soldier who came within range.
His presence kept men fighting who might otherwise have broken.
When soldiers saw their commander standing upright in the middle of the chaos, they found it harder to run.
Behind the 105th position, the 10th Marine Artillery Regiment had set up their 105 mm howitzers.
When the Japanese broke through the infantry lines and kept coming, the Marine gunners did something desperate.
They lowered their howitzers to point blank range and fired directly into the oncoming waves.
The guns were designed to lob shells miles away.
Now they were firing at targets a h 100red yards in front of them.
Each blast tore holes in the Japanese ranks, but the attackers kept coming.
They climbed over their own dead and kept running toward the American guns.
The Marines fired until their barrels overheated.
Then they destroyed their own howitzers to keep them from being captured and fell back.
By 0600, 90 minutes into the attack, the 105th Infantry Regiment had been split into fragments.
Some soldiers had been pushed back toward the beach.
Others were completely surrounded.
Small pockets of men fought alone, cut off from any support, burning through ammunition they could not replace.
Baker was still firing.
His rifle had jammed at some point during the fighting.
Carbon buildup, sand, blood.
It did not matter why.
What mattered was that the weapon was useless, so he picked up another rifle from a dead soldier and kept shooting.
The Japanese had expected to overwhelm the Americans with sheer numbers.
They had succeeded in breaking through the lines, but the Americans were not surrendering.
They were not running into the sea.
They were fighting back with everything they had, and the bodies were piling up on both sides.
By 0700, the Japanese advance had pushed over a thousand yards past the original American positions.
They had overrun the artillery.
They had scattered two battalions, but they had also lost thousands of men in the process.
The attack was beginning to lose momentum.
Scattered American units started to consolidate.
Soldiers who had been pushed back found each other and formed new defensive positions.
Officers who had lost their companies took command of whoever was nearby.
The chaos was slowly becoming organized resistance.
Baker was wounded somewhere during these hours.
The exact moment is not recorded.
Shrapnel, most likely, a grenade that landed too close.
He was bleeding.
Moving was painful.
A medic or fellow soldier probably told him to fall back to get to an aid station to save himself.
He refused.
The Japanese were still attacking.
His fellow soldiers were still dying.
And Thomas Baker was not the kind of man who left a fight while he could still pull a trigger.
He kept firing, sometimes at distances so close he could see the expressions on Japanese faces as they died.
Five yards, three yards.
Close enough to smell the sake on their breath.
Close enough to see the moment when the light left their eyes.
His second rifle broke.
The stock shattered during hand-to-hand combat.
He had used it as a club when the ammunition ran out, swinging at Japanese soldiers who had gotten too close to shoot.
Now he had no weapon at all.
He was wounded.
He was exhausted.
He was surrounded by the bodies of enemy soldiers he had killed.
and American soldiers he had failed to save.
The morning sun was rising over Saipan.
The attack had been going on for nearly three hours, and Private Thomas Baker was about to make the decision that would earn him the Medal of Honor.
A fellow soldier found him and tried to carry him to safety.
Baker was too badly hurt to walk on his own.
The soldier lifted him and started moving toward the rear, toward the beach, toward the aid stations that might be able to save his life.
They made it about 50 yards before that soldier was shot.
The soldier who had been carrying Baker collapsed with a bullet wound of his own.
Now there were two wounded Americans lying in the open exposed to enemy fire with Japanese soldiers still moving through the area.
Baker made his decision in that moment.
He told the wounded soldier to leave him, to save himself, to get back to the American lines and keep fighting.
Baker was too badly hurt to move on his own.
Carrying him would only get more men killed.
He had seen what happened to soldiers who tried to rescue their wounded under fire.
They died, too.
And then nobody got saved.
The soldier refused at first.
You did not leave a fellow American behind.
That was not how they had been trained.
That was not who they were.
But Baker was insistent.
He made it clear that he would rather die alone than cause another soldier to die trying to save him.
Another American soldier came across them during the withdrawal.
He saw Baker lying there bleeding, unable to walk, and offered to help.
Baker refused again.
He was not going to be the reason more good men died on this island.
Then Baker made his final request.
He asked to be propped up against a small tree, sitting position, facing the direction the Japanese were coming from.
He wanted to see them when they came for him, and he asked for a pistol.
One of the withdrawing soldiers had an M1911 service pistol, standard American sidearm, semi-automatic, seven rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber, eight bullets total.
Baker took the pistol.
He checked that it was loaded.
Eight rounds.
That was all he had left.
Eight chances to take an enemy soldier with him before the end.
The soldiers who left him there would remember that moment for the rest of their lives.
Thomas Baker, 28 years old, from Troy, New York, sitting against a tree with a pistol in his hand, calm, steady, waiting.
He did not beg them to stay.
He did not cry.
He did not rage against the unfairness of dying 8,000 mi from home on an island most Americans had never heard of.
He simply sat there facing the enemy, ready to fight until he could not fight anymore.
The last time anyone saw Thomas Baker alive, he was in exactly that position, propped against the tree, pistol raised, eyes forward.
The battle was still raging around him.
Japanese soldiers were still pouring through the area and somewhere in that chaos, Baker was waiting for them to find him.
What happened next, no one witnessed directly.
The American soldiers who left Baker had to focus on their own survival.
The fighting continued for hours.
The Japanese advance was finally stopped around midm morning when a hastily assembled American defensive line held firm near Tanipag Village.
By noon, the largest bonsai charge of the Pacific War was over.
The Japanese had advanced over a thousand yards.
They had overrun two battalions.
They had killed or wounded nearly a thousand American soldiers, but they had failed to break through completely.
And they had paid for that failure with their lives.
The body count was staggering.
American soldiers moving back through the battlefield found Japanese dead everywhere, piled on top of each other, stacked in foxholes, scattered across the plane.
The official count would eventually reach over 4,300 Japanese killed in the attack alone.
The American losses were devastating as well.
The first and second battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment had been nearly destroyed.
406 men killed, 512 wounded.
That was roughly 80% of their effective strength gone in a single morning.
Among the American dead was Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien.
He had refused to leave the front lines even after being wounded multiple times.
When his pistol ammunition ran out, he had climbed onto a jeep-mounted 50 caliber machine gun and kept firing.
The last time anyone saw him alive, he was standing upright on that jeep, shooting into the waves of Japanese attackers that were surrounding him.
Captain Benjamin Solomon, the battalion dentist who had volunteered to run an aid station, was also dead.
When Japanese soldiers overran his position, he had grabbed a machine gun and held them off long enough for wounded soldiers to escape.
His body was found with 98 dead Japanese soldiers in front of his position.
Three men from the same regiment.
Three acts of extraordinary courage on the same morning.
All three would receive the Medal of Honor.
O’Brien and Baker postumously in 1945.
Salomon would have to wait until 2002 when the rules about medical personnel using heavy weapons were finally reconsidered.
But on the morning of July 7th, 1944, none of that mattered.
What mattered was finding the men who were still missing, recovering the bodies of those who had fallen, and learning what had happened to Private Thomas Baker.
last seen alive with eight bullets and a calm expression on his face.
When American soldiers finally reached the tree where they had left him, they found their answer.
Thomas Baker was still sitting against the tree.
His back was propped against the trunk just as his fellow soldiers had left him.
His eyes were open.
The M1911 pistol was still in his hand.
The pistol was empty.
Around his body, arranged in a rough semicircle facing his position, lay eight dead Japanese soldiers, eight bullets, eight enemy dead.
Baker had not missed a single shot.
The soldiers who found him stood in silence for a long moment.
They had seen death before.
Three weeks on Saipan had shown them every possible way a man could die.
But this was different.
This was something they would talk about for the rest of their lives.
Baker had known he was going to die.
He had accepted it.
He had refused evacuation specifically because he did not want to endanger anyone else.
And then sitting alone against that tree, he had waited for the enemy to come to him.
When they came, he had killed every single one of them.
One bullet at a time.
Eight pulls of the trigger.
Eight Japanese soldiers who would never go home.
The scene told its own story.
Baker had not panicked.
He had not fired wildly into the darkness and hoped for the best.
He had waited until each target was close enough to guarantee a kill and then he had taken the shot.
Wounded, bleeding, knowing that each bullet brought him one step closer to being completely defenseless.
Some of those Japanese soldiers must have been very close when he shot them.
Close enough to see the muzzle flash.
Close enough to watch him raise the pistol and aim.
Close enough to understand in their final moment that this wounded American they had expected to find helpless was going to kill them instead.
The eighth shot would have been the hardest.
Not physically.
Pulling a trigger takes almost no effort, but mentally, psychologically, that eighth shot meant Baker had nothing left.
No more bullets, no more defense, just a wounded man with an empty pistol waiting for the next Japanese soldier to find him.
Whether more enemy soldiers came after that eighth shot, no one would ever know.
Baker was dead when they found him.
The cause could have been his wounds finally claiming him.
It could have been a Japanese soldier who arrived after the pistol was empty.
The historical record does not say, and the men who found him could not tell.
What they could tell was that Thomas Baker had faced death on his own terms.
He had chosen how he would spend his final minutes, and he had made those minutes count.
Word spread through the surviving soldiers of the 105th Infantry Regiment within hours.
The story of the man who asked for eight bullets.
The man they found surrounded by eight dead Japanese.
It was the kind of story that soldiers needed to hear after a morning like that one.
Proof that courage still mattered.
Proof that one man, even a dying man, could still make a difference.
The Battle of Saipan officially ended 2 days later on July 9th, 1944.
American forces declared the island secure.
The Japanese garrison had been effectively destroyed.
Out of roughly 30,000 defenders, nearly 29,000 were dead.
Only about a thousand had been taken prisoner, most of them Korean laborers who had been forced to work for the Japanese military.
The American cost had been significant as well.
Over 3,000 killed, over 10,000 wounded.
The 27th Infantry Division alone had suffered devastating casualties, particularly the 105th Regiment that had absorbed the main force of the Bonsai attack.
But securing the island did not end the dying.
In the days following the battle, American soldiers and marines witnessed something that would haunt them for decades.
Japanese civilians on Saipan, told by their military that Americans would torture and kill them, began committing mass suicide.
Families jumped off cliffs on the northern end of the island.
Mothers threw their children into the sea before jumping themselves.
Soldiers watched helplessly as hundreds of people chose death over surrender.
The cliffs would later be named Suicide Cliff and Bonsai Cliff.
Memorial stand there today.
The tragedy of those civilian deaths would become part of the larger tragedy of Saipan, a battle that killed more than 46,000 people in less than a month.
For the American military, Saipan was a strategic victory.
The island’s airfields would soon host the B-29 Superfortress bombers that would rain fire on Japanese cities.
The loss of Saipan forced the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.
The inner defensive perimeter of the Japanese Empire had been breached.
For the men of the 105th Infantry Regiment, Saipan was something more personal.
It was the place where they had lost friends.
The place where they had faced impossible odds and somehow survived.
The place where Thomas Baker had shown them what courage looked like in its purest form.
The army moved quickly to recognize what had happened on July 7th.
Reports were filed.
Witness statements were collected.
The actions of Baker, O’Brien, and Salomon were documented in detail.
Baker’s company commander began preparing a recommendation for the Medal of Honor.
The Medal of Honor is not given lightly.
It is the highest military decoration awarded by the United States government.
The requirements are extraordinary.
The act of valor must be above and beyond the call of duty.
It must involve risk of life.
It must be witnessed and documented, and it must be so exceptional that no lesser award would be appropriate.
The process of awarding the Medal of Honor during World War II was rigorous.
Recommendations had to pass through multiple levels of review.
Company commanders submitted initial reports.
Battalion and regimenal commanders added their evaluations.
Division headquarters reviewed the evidence.
Then the recommendation went to core level, army level, and finally to Washington.
At any point, the recommendation could be downgraded or rejected.
Many acts of extraordinary courage receive silver stars or distinguished service crosses instead.
The Medal of Honor was reserved for cases where the evidence was overwhelming and the heroism was undeniable.
Thomas Baker’s case was undeniable.
The witnesses were numerous.
Soldiers had seen him charge the Japanese position with a bazooka on June 19th.
They had seen him kill 12 enemy soldiers in fortified positions.
They had seen him eliminate six more infiltrators behind American lines.
They had watched him fight through the bonsai attack until his rifle broke in hand-to-hand combat.
They had carried him when he could no longer walk, and they had left him, at his own insistence, propped against a tree with eight bullets.
When they returned, they found the proof of what he had done with those eight bullets.
The recommendation moved through channels faster than most.
By the standards of military bureaucracy during a global war, Baker’s Medal of Honor was processed with remarkable speed, but it would still take months.
The war was not over.
There were other battles to fight, other islands to capture.
The paperwork would have to wait.
Meanwhile, the men who had survived the Bonsai attack tried to make sense of what they had experienced.
The 105th Infantry Regiment was a shattered unit.
80% casualties in a single morning.
The survivors were exhausted, traumatized, and grieving for friends they would never see again.
The army pulled the regiment off the front lines to reorganize.
Fresh replacements arrived to fill the empty ranks.
New faces mixed with the hollow-eyed veterans who had lived through July 7th.
The regiment would need months to rebuild before it could fight again.
The story of Thomas Baker became part of the regiment’s identity during those months.
New soldiers heard about the man with eight bullets from the veterans who had known him.
The story was told in barracks and mess halls passed from one soldier to another until everyone in the unit knew it.
Baker became a symbol of what the 105th had endured and what its soldiers were capable of.
When the regiment eventually returned to combat, his example would go with them.
The 27th Infantry Division spent the rest of 1944 refitting and training.
The losses on Saipan had been severe, but the division would be needed again.
The American advance across the Pacific was accelerating.
Each island brought them closer to Japan.
Each battle brought higher casualties as the Japanese defenders fought with increasing desperation.
The next major operation for the 27th Division would be Okinawa, scheduled for April of 1945.
That battle would make Saipan look small by comparison.
Over 82 days of fighting, more than 12,000 Americans killed, over a 100,000 Japanese military dead, tens of thousands of civilian casualties.
But that was still in the future.
In the fall of 1944, the survivors of Saipan were focused on rebuilding their shattered units and processing what they had experienced.
Back in Troy, New York, the Baker family received the notification that Thomas was dead, killed in action on Saipan.
The details would come later.
First came the telegram, then the letters from his commanding officers, then eventually the news that he was being considered for the Medal of Honor.
The city of Troy had already lost Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien, another native son.
Now they had lost Private Thomas Baker as well.
Two men from the same small city in upstate New York, both killed on the same day, both recommended for the nation’s highest military honor.
The coincidence was remarkable.
Troy had a population of roughly 70,000 people.
The odds of two Medal of Honor recipients coming from the same city, the same regiment, dying in the same battle were astronomically small.
Yet, that was exactly what had happened.
The War Department continued processing both recommendations through the fall and winter of 1944.
The evidence was reviewed.
The witness statements were verified.
The chain of command added their endorsements.
By early 1945, both recommendations had reached the final stage of approval.
The war in Europe was approaching its end.
The war in the Pacific was entering its most brutal phase.
And in Washington, decisions were being made about how to honor the men who had given everything on a volcanic island 8,000 mi from home.
The announcement would come in May of 1945.
But Thomas Baker would not be the only soldier from the 105th Infantry Regiment to receive the Medal of Honor that day.
On May 8th, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied powers.
The war in Europe was over.
Celebrations erupted across the United States and Britain.
After nearly 6 years of fighting, Adolf Hitler was dead and Nazi Germany had been defeated.
But for the men fighting in the Pacific, the war continued.
The Battle of Okinawa was still raging.
Kamicazi attacks were sinking American ships.
and the Japanese home islands remained unconquered, defended by millions of soldiers who had been told to fight to the death.
The following day, May 9th, 1945, the War Department made an announcement that received far less attention than the German surrender.
Three soldiers from the 105th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division, would receive the Medal of Honor for their actions during the Battle of Saipan.
Lieutenant Colonel William J.
O’Brien, Private Thomas A.
Baker.
Both awards were postuous.
Both men had died on July 7th, 1944 during the largest bonsai attack of the Pacific War.
The third recipient was Captain Ben L.
Solomon, the regimental dentist who had manned a machine gun to protect wounded soldiers.
But Solomon’s award would be delayed.
The Geneva Convention prohibited medical personnel from using offensive weapons, and questions about whether a dentist operating a machine gun violated those rules would take decades to resolve.
Solomon would not receive his Medal of Honor until 2002, 58 years after his death.
Baker and O’Brien, however, would be honored immediately.
The official citation for Thomas Baker detailed his actions across the entire Saipan campaign.
It described how he had destroyed the Japanese imp placement with a bazooka on June 19th.
How he had attacked and killed two officers and 10 enlisted men in fortified positions.
How he had eliminated six more enemy soldiers behind American lines.
How he had fought through the bonsai attack until his weapon was destroyed in hand-to-hand combat.
And then the citation described his final act.
The language was formal, as military citations always are.
It spoke of how Baker refused evacuation, how he insisted on being left behind rather than risk more lives, how he requested a pistol with eight rounds of ammunition, how he was last seen propped against a tree, weapon in hand, calmly facing the enemy.
The final sentence of the citation stated simply that when his body was recovered, the pistol was empty and eight Japanese soldiers lay dead in front of his position.
The Medal of Honor ceremony for O’Brien took place at Renolier Polytenic Institute in Troy, New York on May 27th, 1945.
His widow and young son received the medal on his behalf.
The ceremony was attended by military officials, local dignitaries, and citizens of Troy who had known O’Brien before the war.
Baker’s medal was presented to his family in a separate ceremony.
The young man who had enlisted from Troy in October of 1940 had come home as a hero.
Not alive as his family had hoped, but remembered, honored, immortalized in the records of American military history.
The people of Troy now had two Medal of Honor recipients from the same battle.
Two men who had grown up in the same city, served in the same regiment, fought in the same desperate morning, and died within hours of each other.
The local newspapers covered both ceremonies extensively.
The stories of O’Brien and Baker became part of Troy’s identity, a source of pride for a small industrial city that had sent its sons to fight on the other side of the world.
The war in the Pacific would end 3 months later.
On August 6th, 1945, an American B29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
3 days later, a second bomb destroyed Nagasaki.
On August 15th, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender.
The most destructive war in human history was finally over.
The B-29s that dropped those bombs had flown from bases in the Marana Islands.
From Tinian, just 3 mi south of Saipan.
The airfields that Thomas Baker and his fellow soldiers had fought to capture were now launching the weapons that ended the war.
There was a direct line between the blood spilled on the Tanipac plane and the mushroom clouds over Japan.
The men who died in the bonsai attack had made those airfields possible.
Their sacrifice had brought American bombers within range of the Japanese home islands.
The strategic logic was clear.
Even if the human cost was almost impossible to comprehend, over 4,000 Japanese soldiers had died in that single morning attack.
over 900 Americans, all for a few square miles of volcanic rock that would become a runway for heavy bombers.
Thomas Baker had not known any of this when he asked for those eight bullets.
He had not known that Saipan would become a launching point for the end of the war.
He had only known that he was dying, that his friends were in danger, and that he would not go quietly.
The Medal of Honor recognized what he did in those final minutes, but the full meaning of his sacrifice would only become clear in the months and years that followed.
His grave would need a permanent home.
His memory would need permanent guardians.
Thomas Baker was buried at the Gerald BH Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery in Skylerville, New York.
The cemetery sits about 30 mi north of Troy in the rolling hills of upstate New York where Baker had grown up.
It was a long way from the volcanic rock and jungle heat of Saipan, but it was home.
The army had postuously promoted Baker from private to sergeant before awarding him the Medal of Honor.
It was a small recognition, almost symbolic compared to the medal itself, but it mattered.
Baker had enlisted as a private in 1940 and remained a private for nearly 4 years.
Whatever had kept him at that rank during peace time was erased by what he did in combat.
He would be remembered as Sergeant Thomas A.
Baker, Medal of Honor recipient.
His grave is marked with a simple white headstone, identical to thousands of others in the cemetery.
The Medal of Honor is indicated by a small inscription.
Visitors who do not know the story might walk past without a second glance.
Those who know what happened on Saipan tend to stand a little longer.
The 27th Infantry Division continued fighting after Saipan.
The division participated in the Battle of Okinawa from April to June of 1945, suffering additional heavy casualties.
Many of the men who had survived the Bonsai attack on July 7th did not survive Okinawa.
The division was preparing for the invasion of mainland Japan when the atomic bombs ended the war.
After the war, the 27th Division was demobilized.
The citizen soldiers who had served returned to their homes and tried to build normal lives.
They carried the memories of what they had seen and done.
But most rarely spoke about it.
That was the way of that generation.
They had done their duty.
Now they wanted to move forward.
But some memories refused to fade.
The story of Thomas Baker continued to circulate among military historians and Medal of Honor researchers in the decades after the war.
His final stand became one of the most cited examples of individual courage under impossible circumstances.
Militarymies studied his actions.
Training programs referenced his example.
The man with eight bullets became a teaching tool for what one soldier could accomplish when everything else had failed.
The 105th Infantry Regiment was eventually reorganized as part of the New York Army National Guard.
The lineage of the unit stretched back to the Civil War and it would continue into the 21st century.
New generations of soldiers inherited the history of Saipan and the legacy of the men who had fought there.
In 2009, 65 years after the battle, the city of Troy dedicated a memorial to its Medal of Honor recipients.
The memorial was installed in the Rinsolier County Office Building and honored three men, Lieutenant Colonel William J.
O’Brien, Sergeant Thomas A.
Baker, and Major General Ogden J.
Ross, a former commander of the 105th Infantry who had served as an assistant division commander during the Battle of Saipan.
The memorial included replicas of the Medals of Honor awarded to O’Brien and Baker.
It was a permanent reminder that this small city in upstate New York had produced two of the most decorated soldiers of the Pacific War.
Both had served in the same regiment.
Both had died on the same day.
Both had faced overwhelming odds and refused to surrender.
The battle of Saipan itself became the subject of extensive historical study.
Military historians analyzed every aspect of the campaign from the amphibious landings to the final bonsai attack.
The battle was recognized as a turning point in the Pacific War.
The moment when the Japanese inner defensive perimeter was decisively broken.
The human cost of that turning point was never forgotten.
Saipan today is part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marana Islands, a United States territory.
The battlefields have been reclaimed by jungle and development.
Hotels and golf courses stand where men once fought and died.
But memorials dot the island, marking the places where the fighting was heaviest.
Bonsai Cliff and Suicide Cliff on the northern end of Saipan remain somber reminders of the tragedy that followed the battle.
Japanese tourists visit to pay respects to the civilians who died there.
American veterans and their descendants visit to understand what their fathers and grandfathers experienced.
The legacy of July 7th, 1944 extended far beyond the men who fought that day.
It shaped how the American military understood Japanese resistance.
It influenced planning for future operations.
It demonstrated that even cornered and hopeless enemies could inflict devastating casualties if they were willing to die.
That lesson would be applied at Iuima, at Okinawa, and in the planning for Operation Downfall, the proposed invasion of mainland Japan.
The bonsai attack on Saipan was proof that the Japanese military would not surrender easily.
Every island would have to be taken by force.
Every victory would come at a terrible price.
Thomas Baker had paid that price with eight bullets and his life.
His story was not finished.
History had one more chapter to write.
Every year on the anniversary of July 7th, a small number of people remember what happened on the Tanipag plane.
Veterans organizations hold ceremonies.
Military historians publish articles.
Descendants of the men who fought there gather to honor their ancestors.
The numbers grow smaller each year.
The last surviving veterans of the Battle of Saipan are gone now.
The men who witnessed Thomas Baker’s final stand, who left him against that tree, who returned to find him surrounded by enemy dead, have all passed on.
Their memories died with them, but the story survives.
The Medal of Honor citation remains in the official records of the United States Army.
It can be read online, in military archives, in history books.
The formal language describes what Baker did without capturing what it meant.
The words are precise and bureaucratic as military documents always are.
They tell you the facts.
They cannot tell you what it felt like to be there.
What the citation cannot convey is the silence after the battle.
The way the survivors looked at each other knowing they had lived through something that would define the rest of their lives.
The weight of walking back to find a friend who had chosen to die alone rather than endanger anyone else.
Thomas Baker was 28 years old when he died.
He had spent four years in the army, most of it training and waiting.
He had less than a month of actual combat experience.
Nothing in his pre-war life suggested that he would become one of the most decorated soldiers of the Pacific War.
He was not a professional warrior.
He was a citizen who had answered his country’s call, served where he was sent, and discovered something inside himself that most people never have to find.
The capacity to face certain death with calm determination.
the willingness to sacrifice everything so that others might live.
That discovery came in his final hours when he charged the Japanese position with a bazooka.
When he killed 18 enemy soldiers in separate engagements, when he fought until his rifle shattered, when he refused evacuation, when he asked for eight bullets and a place to sit.
The Japanese soldiers who died in front of his tree never knew his name.
They saw only a wounded American with a pistol.
They expected an easy kill.
They found something else entirely.
Eight of them found Sergeant Thomas A.
Baker.
The lessons of his sacrifice extend beyond military tactics or strategic analysis.
Baker’s final stand was about something more fundamental.
The choice to matter.
The decision to make your death mean something when death has become inevitable.
Most people never face that choice.
Most people live ordinary lives and die ordinary deaths surrounded by family, mourned by friends, remembered for a generation or two before fading into the vast anonymity of history.
There is no shame in that.
It is the human condition.
But some people in some moments are given a different choice.
They can surrender to the inevitable or they can resist it with everything they have left.
Thomas Baker resisted with eight bullets.
His grave in Skylerville, New York, receives visitors throughout the year.
Some are family members.
Some are military personnel paying respects to a fellow soldier.
Some are historians researching the Battle of Saipan.
Some are ordinary citizens who heard the story and wanted to see where the man with eight bullets was laid to rest.
The white headstone does not tell the full story.
It gives his name, his rank, his dates of birth and death, and the small notation indicating the Medal of Honor.
Everything else must be carried in the minds of those who remember.
That is where you come in.
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Stories about soldiers who gave everything with nothing but courage and determination.
Real people, real heroism.
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Thank you for watching and thank you for making sure Sergeant Thomas Baker does not disappear into silence.
On the morning of July 7th, 1944, a wounded soldier asked his friends for a pistol with eight bullets.
They found him later still sitting against that tree, the pistol empty.
Eight enemy soldiers dead at his feet.
He had made his choice.
He had made it count.
These men deserve to be remembered and you are helping make that
