3 Americans Who Turned Back a 5,000 Man Banzai Charge!

Friday, July 7th, 1944.

The night over Saipan was thick and heavy, the kind of darkness that seemed to soak into your lungs when you breathed. Men slept in shallow foxholes or slumped against their rifles, boots still on, helmets tipped over their eyes. The air stank of cordite and sweat and the slow rot of things that had been dead too long in tropical heat.

Somewhere out in the gloom, waves hissed against the island’s northern shore. Palms creaked. Insects buzzed. Farther still, beyond the black silhouette of the jungle, the sea stretched level and indifferent, holding the silhouettes of ships like secrets.

The men of the 105th Infantry Regiment, 27th Division, were bone-deep exhausted.

For weeks they’d been fighting across Saipan—through sugarcane fields and jungle patches, up ridges of volcanic rock, into caves that spat fire. They’d come ashore after the Marines, when the beachhead was secure enough to accept fresh meat. It hadn’t felt secure to them. Nothing on Saipan felt secure. Every draw hid a gun, every ridge another ambush.

Tonight, at least, seemed quiet. The line lay across the Tanapag Plain, a shallow, open sweep of ground broken by scrub and scattered trees. Beyond it, somewhere in the dark, were Japanese survivors—shattered remnants of units that had once been proud, carefully drilled formations of the Imperial Army.

There weren’t supposed to be many left. That was what everyone said. Intelligence officers. Battalion staff. Voices on radios that were never close enough to catch a bullet.

They were wrong.

Out there in the dark, in gullies and ravines and caves cut into the hills, thousands of Japanese soldiers still waited. And this night, for them, wasn’t one more step in a long campaign. It was the end.

The Emperor had decreed that Saipan could not fall.

No Japanese soldier, no civilian, no child could surrender the island. Death was to be chosen over defeat.

They had watched their lines collapse, watched tanks burn, watched their artillery pounded into silence. They had run low on food and medical supplies. Their wounded lay on stretchers or bare ground, bleeding into the dirt.

But they still had rifles. They still had bayonets. They still had the voice of their god-emperor whispering through orders passed down the chain of command: you will not live to see Saipan in American hands.

So they gathered.

Officers with swords strapped tight to their sides. NCOs with bamboo sticks, ready to club anyone who hesitated. Enlisted men with bandaged arms and hollow eyes, clutching Arisaka rifles. Men from shattered companies, reorganized on the fly. Labor troops shoved forward into the mass. Even walking wounded, limping, leaning, but determined to add their bodies to the wave.

Five thousand of them.

They formed up in the dark, in the ravines and behind low ridges, shoulder to shoulder. Those close enough to see the officers heard the last words:

“This is the final charge. We will break them or die.”

They knew which way the odds leaned.

They screamed “Banzai!” into the dark sky—not just once, but over and over, a building roar that rolled across the ground like thunder from some primitive god.

On the American line, men snapped awake.

Someone shook a buddy hard. “You hear that? You hear that?”

The first wave of sound was distant, almost weirdly unreal—like a crowd at a far-off football game. Then it grew, riding on the morning damp, gaining teeth and depth until it was no longer noise but a wall of human rage.

The ground began to vibrate: five thousand boots, sandals, bare feet pounding in unison.

The Tanapag Plain, which had been a haunted emptiness hours before, turned into a killing field advancing on the 105th Infantry.

In the half-light, in trenches and foxholes and scraped-out scrapes, men fumbled for rifles, slapped magazines into clips, clawed at helmet straps. Somebody cursed as they jammed a bayonet onto a muzzle with shaking hands. Another man just stared for a few seconds, eyes wide, before training took over and he reached for his weapon.

On the line, a tall, broad-shouldered officer looked up from the shallow sleep of the exhausted and realized the nightmare he was hearing was real.

Lieutenant Colonel William J. O’Brien had led his regiment ashore only days after the Marines. He’d led them through cane fields and up ridges. He’d already watched too many of them die.

Now, on the edge of dawn, he saw the leading edge of the banzai charge boiling out of the darkness—thousands of figures, bayonets glinting, mouths open in a united howl. It looked like something from another century, a massed infantry attack straight out of history books, except this time the bullets were real and he was standing in their way.

For half a heartbeat, even he froze. Any man would.

Then he moved.

He didn’t step back. He stepped forward.

He drew not one, but two M1911 .45 pistols from their holsters, one in each hand. The big Colt automatics felt solid and familiar, extensions of his will.

He strode along the trench line, dragging men up by their collars, shouting them awake, his voice cutting through the panic.

“On your feet! On your feet, damn it! They’re coming! Hold this line!”

He fired as he went, .45 slugs punching into the oncoming mass. The recoil slammed through his arms again and again, brass casings clinking away into the dirt. He didn’t shoot to scare. He shot to kill. Every squeeze of the triggers put another man down, but still they came—more behind, more behind, the wave unbroken.

In the foxholes ahead of him, some of his men stopped shaking and started shooting, following his example. Rifles cracked. BARs began their stuttering roar. Grenades arced out and blossomed among the charging Japanese.

But the banzai didn’t stop.

It was the largest banzai attack of the entire war. Five thousand men, convinced that dying in a final righteous storm was better than surrender.

Somewhere down the line from O’Brien, a lanky private from New York shoved himself up from the mud and felt the ground literally shiver under the weight of the charge.

Thomas A. Baker wiped blood—he wasn’t sure whose—from his face and peered over the lip of his foxhole.

He’d been fighting on Saipan long enough to learn the island’s strange rhythm—sudden bursts of violence, then awful quiet. He’d crawled through jungle, bunkers, caves. On June 19th, just weeks earlier, he’d calmly shot a Japanese sniper out of a palm tree, then turned his M1 on a full squad erupting from the brush, dropping them one by one.

He wasn’t loud. He didn’t brag. He simply fought with a slow, steady burn, methodical and deadly.

Now, on the morning of July 7th, Baker looked at the oncoming tidal wave and felt something deep inside him go very still.

This was it.

There would be no clean withdrawal. No safe rear area. No place to fall back to where the shouting stopped and the coffee got hot again.

The Emperor wanted them dead.

Baker set his jaw and began to move.

Fifty yards behind the front line, the battalion aid station was lit by flickering lantern light and the flashes from outside. The canvas walls rippled with each artillery blast. Inside, the air was heavy with the metallic tang of blood, the sour-sweet smell of infection, the chemical sting of alcohol and iodine.

Cots crowded every available space. Men lay on them, bandaged stumps where limbs had been, torsos wrapped in gauze stained through with red. Some moaned. Some stared at the ceiling, silent, eyes glassy. Others clenched teeth against pain as medics worked on them.

At the center of that whirlwind stood a man wearing captain’s bars and a Red Cross brassard around his arm. His hands were gloved, his face smeared with sweat and someone else’s blood.

Captain Benjamin L. Salomon was technically the regimental dentist. He was supposed to pull teeth, fill cavities, make sure gum disease didn’t take men out of the fight.

War had no use for technicalities.

When the battalion surgeon was killed in earlier fighting, Salomon had stepped into the gap, volunteering to run the aid station. He’d traded dental pliers for scalpels, dental drills for bone saws, and he’d done it without fuss. Men came to him broken and bleeding and left either dead or with a chance to live.

Tonight had been bad, even by Saipan standards. The cots had filled early. Then the floor space. Then they’d started laying men on blankets outside the tent, doing what they could under open sky.

Now, as the banzai charge rolled toward them, the very ground beneath the station trembled.

An orderly stumbled in from outside, eyes wild.

“Captain,” he gasped. “They’re coming. A lot of them. They broke through up front.”

Salomon didn’t look up from the bullet he was probing for in a man’s abdomen. His voice stayed even.

“Keep working. We’ll move when we have to.”

But seconds later, the war came to them whether he was ready or not.

The tent flaps blew inward under a sudden, violent impact. A Japanese soldier, face twisted in a snarl, burst through, rifle leveled.

A wounded American on a cot grabbed for his own weapon, trying to swing it up, but he was too slow.

Salomon moved.

He ripped the M1 rifle from the wounded man’s hands and fired from the hip, one shot at near point-blank range. The Japanese soldier jerked backwards and fell, his body half in and half out of the tent.

Before the echo of the shot had fully faded, four more enemy soldiers crawled under the canvas walls, bayonets glinting.

Salomon dropped the empty rifle, pivoted, and became something else.

He drove his bayonet into the first man’s chest, the blade punching through cloth and bone. He yanked it free, spun, fired the rifle he still somehow held on the second, the shot taking the man in the throat. The third rushed him—Salomon met him with the butt of the gun, smashing it into the man’s face, feeling bone break under the impact. The fourth lunged low; Salomon dropped the rifle completely and tackled him, hands finding the man’s throat, fingers digging in. He squeezed and slammed the man’s head against the ground until he stopped moving.

When he straightened, chest heaving, the inside of the aid station was suddenly, impossibly, quiet.

Outside, the roar of the banzai was closer.

He looked at the rows of wounded, at the orderlies and corpsmen whose hands had frozen mid-motion.

“Get the wounded out,” he shouted over the growing noise. “Now! Carry who you can. Help who you can. I’ll cover you.”

A couple of medics stammered protests. “Sir, you—”

“Move!” he snapped, with all the force of an order that brooked no argument.

He grabbed another M1 from a rack near the entrance and stepped out into the chaos.

Back on the front line, O’Brien’s two .45s finally clicked empty.

He dropped the magazines, slammed fresh ones home, fired again. A bullet punched into his shoulder, spinning him halfway around. For a second the world flashed white.

Someone reached for him. “Colonel, you’re hit!”

O’Brien shrugged the hand off. Blood soaked his sleeve, hot and sticky, but his legs were still under him. He did not have time to care.

He looked around and saw a jeep not far behind the line, a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on its back, its crew lying dead or wounded next to it.

That gun, he knew, could carve lanes through masses of men. That gun might make the difference between the line buckling and the line holding.

So he went to it.

Staggering, half slipping in the dirt, he scrambled onto the jeep. Hands slick with his own blood, he wrapped them around the butterfly triggers of the heavy machine gun.

He squeezed.

The .50 cal roared to life with its deep, bone-rattling thud-thud-thud. Tracers reached out in bright arcs, like white-hot fingers, into the banzai wave.

Where they struck, men fell.

In front of the jeep, in the half-light of dawn, the charging Japanese were suddenly stripped bare of myth and fanaticism, turned into jerking, falling bodies by the brutal math of heavy-caliber rounds.

O’Brien raked the gun left and right, cutting swaths through the mass. The recoil pounded through his wounded shoulder, sending flashes of pain up his neck. He ignored it, his teeth bare in something that was not quite a smile.

Behind him, his men heard the hammering of the .50 and felt something in their own spines stiffen.

If the colonel could still fight, they could too.

They fired, reloaded, fired again, clustering their efforts around the lanes O’Brien was opening. Grenades flew. BARs chattered.

The banzai charge hit like a tsunami, but it was hitting rock, not sand.

Up front, Private Thomas Baker’s foxhole collapsed under the shock of explosives and bodies and earth.

Dirt rained down on him. For a moment, he was buried to his waist, ears ringing, lungs burning.

He clawed out, pushing aside loose sand, and popped up in a world that had gone completely insane.

Japanese soldiers were everywhere—running, shouting, firing. A machine gun not far away had pinned down his squad, keeping their heads glued to the dirt while enemy troops closed in.

Baker didn’t wait for orders. He grabbed a bazooka—a clumsy, heavy tube—and a rocket round.

He rose into the open, every instinct screaming to stay low, and sprinted straight toward the gun’s muzzle flashes.

Bullets snapped past. One tugged at his sleeve. Another kicked dust at his boots. He didn’t slow.

At almost point-blank range, he shouldered the bazooka, sighted for a heartbeat, and pulled the trigger.

The rocket leapt from the tube with a coughing roar, streaked across the short distance, and slammed into the machine gun position.

For half a second, there was a surprisingly neat flash. Then everything in and around that nest turned into a violent jumble of fire, steel, and human forms.

The gun went silent.

Baker didn’t have time to appreciate the sight. He dropped the spent tube, seized a nearby light machine gun—whose crew lay dead around it—and swung it toward a cluster of Japanese soldiers trying to flank his position.

He raked the trigger.

The gun bucked in his arms, stitching bullets through the oncoming squad. Twelve men fell, crumpling into the grass and dirt. Six more appeared behind them, rising from where they’d been hidden by the tall grass, thinking they had surprise on their side.

Baker pivoted and cut them down too.

Still, the wave pressed on.

Fifty yards behind, the aid station had become an island in the flood.

Under Salomon’s shouted orders, medics and walking wounded staggered away from it, carrying stretchers, half-dragging, half-supporting men who could no longer walk. Their eyes were wide, seeing Japanese troops closing around them, bullets snapping through the tents they’d just left.

Behind them, Salomon fought his way through the chaos.

He fired his M1 until the clip pinged empty, slamming rounds into men who got too close. When the rifle ran dry and he had no time to reload, he snatched up a carbine. When the carbine’s magazine emptied, he grabbed a pistol from a fallen officer.

Each weapon lasted only as long as it took to run dry. Then he threw it aside and took another.

He was not fighting to hold ground. He was fighting for time. Time for his wounded to get further back. Time for someone—anyone—to shore up the line.

He stumbled upon a .30-caliber machine gun whose crew lay sprawled around it, riddled.

Without hesitation, he dropped behind the gun, slammed a belt into place, and squeezed the trigger.

The .30 cal burst to life, a harsh, rhythmic bark.

Through its sights, he saw Japanese soldiers advancing, some upright, some crouched, all moving forward with that same relentless drive. He saw faces twisted in shouts, saw bayonets glimmering.

He fired into them until the belt ran out.

Then he dragged the gun—heavy, awkward, hot even through its handles—to a new position as the enemy tried to swing around his flanks.

He set it up again, fed another belt, and fired.

Again. And again.

Four times he moved that gun, each time choosing a spot where his bullets would cut the most enemy, where he could buy just a few more seconds for another stretcher to get a little farther away.

He was, in that moment, not a dentist, not even just a doctor. He was a wall of steel and lead, a single man trying to hold back a human tide with nothing but a machine gun, adrenaline, and an absolute refusal to abandon his patients.

Back at the jeep, O’Brien was welded to his .50.

His uniform was torn. Blood ran down his arm, seeped from new wounds he barely registered. The jeep itself shook from the vibration of the gun and the impact of near misses.

No one could quite explain later how he stayed upright as long as he did.

They only remembered that the thumping roar of the .50 never stopped until long after it should have.

Bodies piled in front of his field of fire.

By the time his gun finally went silent, there were stacks of enemy dead three feet high in front of that jeep—men who, had he not been there, would have run right over the 105th’s shattered line and into the soft underbelly behind it.

Near the tree line, Thomas Baker had become something else.

He had been hit—no one knew exactly when. A bullet had punched through his abdomen. Another tore into his side. A shell fragment had ripped his leg wide open.

He should have been on a stretcher. He should have been back at the aid station that no longer existed.

Instead, he fought on.

He swung his M1 rifle like a club when the enemy got too close, smashing it into faces, snapping collarbones, splintering bone. He fought not with technique, but with sheer, raw fury—what some old cultures would have called a berserker rage, what his buddies would simply remember as Baker refusing to die quietly.

No one knows exactly how many men he took with him in those minutes when he was half-standing, half-falling, swinging his rifle until the stock splintered in his hands.

Then another round tore into him, and his legs finally gave.

He fell near a small tree, dragging himself upright against its trunk.

A friend reached for him, trying to haul him back, but a burst of enemy fire stitched the air between them, forcing the would-be rescuer back down.

Baker looked at him, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth, and shook his head.

“Don’t,” he rasped. “Don’t you get yourself killed for me.”

There was no time for argument.

The man hesitated, torn.

Baker knew there was no way he would make it back alive if someone tried to move him.

He also knew the Japanese had no mercy for prisoners.

He made a choice.

He demanded that his buddies leave him there, under the tree. But he asked for one thing: a loaded M1911 pistol.

They pressed it into his hand. Eight rounds in the magazine. One in the chamber.

He checked the slide, then nodded once.

His buddies, guts twisting, pulled back, leaving him propped against that lonely tree, his world reduced to the weight of the .45 in his hand and the waves of enemy soldiers coming toward him.

He waited.

The banzai charge had blown a hole in the front, but it had not swept all before it. The 105th’s line buckled, bent, but did not break entirely.

Behind O’Brien and Baker and the smoky positions where Salomon had fired his last, other men grabbed radios, called for reinforcements, shifted artillery.

The battle raged for hours.

Salomon, out in front with his machine gun, kept firing, kept moving. He killed and killed again until enemy fire finally caught up with him.

When they found his body later, it was behind that .30-caliber gun.

He had been shot twenty-four times before he fell. After death, his body was stabbed and shot over fifty more times, the Japanese afraid enough of one dead man to keep firing into him.

Ninety-eight enemy corpses lay in an arc in front of his final position.

In the end, the banzai charge burned itself out on American steel and stubbornness.

Of the roughly five thousand Japanese who had surged forward that dawn, more than three thousand lay dead on the Tanapag Plain, most of them directly in front of the 105th Infantry’s positions.

The price the Americans paid was brutal.

In less than twelve hours, the 105th’s 1st and 2nd Battalions were nearly destroyed. Four hundred and six men killed. Over five hundred wounded.

Entire companies had been ground down to a dozen survivors. Foxholes that had held two buddies talking about girls in Hawaii now held only empty helmets and cooling rifles.

When the shouting finally faded and the last scattered shots died away, the surviving soldiers of the 105th walked their shattered line and saw what held.

They saw the jeep with the .50, O’Brien slumped behind it, dead where he had stood, the gun silent at last, the field ahead of him carpeted with enemy bodies.

They saw the tree where they had left Baker.

He was still there, slumped as they had propped him, his hand wrapped around an empty pistol. Eight brass casings were scattered at his feet. Eight Japanese soldiers lay within pistol range of his body, sprawled in awkward, permanent poses.

He had done exactly what he’d said he would: he’d made every bullet count.

They found Salomon behind his machine gun, his body torn but still somehow looking as if he might rise, slam a belt into place, and start firing again. Ninety-eight enemy dead in front of him testified that until the moment his lungs stopped drawing breath, he had been the only thing between those men and the wounded he’d sworn to protect.

The line had bent. It had not broken.

If the banzai charge had smashed entirely through, if the 105th had been rolled up and scattered, Japanese troops would have surged into the rear areas, slaughtering wounded, seizing artillery, overrunning supply dumps. The entire northern flank of the American position on Saipan could have collapsed.

Instead, three men—O’Brien on his jeep, Baker under his tree, Salomon in the blood-soaked shadow of his aid station—became pillars in a storm that should have swept everything away.

In the bloody arithmetic of war, their stand bought enough time for others to plug the gaps, to bring up more guns, to close the breach.

The banzai charge failed.

Saipan held.

And because Saipan held, the United States could finish building airfields on its blasted, black rock. From those runways, long-range B-29 Superfortress bombers would later lift off, heavy with fuel and bombs, to fly the fifteen hundred miles to Tokyo and back.

From those flights, the war would be carried straight into Japan’s industrial heartland and, eventually, to the very edge of the Emperor’s own city.

The path from Baker’s tree and O’Brien’s jeep and Salomon’s aid station to the burning of Tokyo was not straight. But it was real.

Years later, the Army—and the nation—would try to put what those three men did into words and medal citations.

Lieutenant Colonel William J. O’Brien was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously for refusing to leave his men, for rallying them in the face of overwhelming odds, and for fighting, literally, to his last bullet behind that .50-caliber gun.

Private Thomas A. Baker received the Medal of Honor as well—for his earlier acts of cold, precise bravery, and for his final stand under that tree, wounded beyond hope, choosing not to risk another man’s life for his own and instead showing the enemy that even alone, even dying, an American soldier would not yield.

Captain Benjamin L. Salomon’s road to recognition was longer and crueler.

Because he was a medical officer, some argued that his manning of a machine gun violated the Geneva Conventions. Paper-pushers far behind the front lines wrangled over legalities while the men who had watched him fight remembered only that he had stood between the enemy and the wounded in his care.

Decades passed.

Survivors kept talking. Officers wrote reports. Family members pressed.

Finally, in 2002—almost sixty years after he had dragged that .30-caliber gun from position to position on Saipan—Benjamin Salomon was awarded the Medal of Honor.

His family accepted it on his behalf.

The citation read, in part, of how, when the enemy descended on his aid station, he had killed those who threatened his patients, ordered his comrades to evacuate, and said, “I’ll hold them off until you get them to safety. See you later.”

In the moments that followed, he single-handedly killed ninety-eight enemy soldiers, saving many American lives but sacrificing his own.

As best the Army could tell, he was shot twenty-four times before he fell, and more than fifty times after death.

When they found him, he was still at his gun.

Today, most people can name the big battles: Normandy, Iwo Jima, the Bulge. Fewer know the name Tanapag Plain. Fewer still could tell you what happened at dawn on July 7th, 1944.

But for the men who were there, for the families who later stared at telegrams and photos, for the Marines and soldiers who would one day walk the ridges of Saipan and feel the ghosts under their boots, the stand of the 105th Infantry is etched in something harder than stone.

Three Americans—an infantry colonel, a quiet farm boy private, and a dentist turned field surgeon—stood in the path of the largest banzai charge in history and turned it back with pistols, rifles, and machine guns.

They did not stand for medals. They did not stand for history books.

They stood for the man next to them.

For the wounded behind them.

For the simple, stubborn refusal to let the line break.

Not all front lines are drawn as neat lines on a map.

Sometimes they’re a jeep with a .50-caliber gun in the back.

Sometimes they’re a tree where a dying man steadies a pistol in his bloody hands.

Sometimes they’re a canvas tent turned into an island of mercy in a sea of madness.

And sometimes they are held, not by armies, but by a single man who refuses, absolutely, to step aside.