The amount of activity in front of the Marine lines was a sure sign that something ominous was building up in the dark.
Shouts and cries echoed in the blackness, the first ones becoming audible around 1230. Scattered mortar rounds began impacting in 1/24's sector. In their hole, Perry, Holt, and Roquet noticed that the Japanese were howling and throwing rocks. The Marines gritted their teeth and waited for the inevitable.
It came at 0200.
The Japanese artillery suddenly let loose. A Company found themselves in the midst of the heaviest bombardment they had endured in three campaigns. During any shelling, the absolute helplessness of any one man to do anything about his fate stared everyone in the face. Sweating, cursing, and praying, with explosions, Japanese shrieking, and the cries of the wounded filling their ears and the lights of fires and flares giving the battlefield a nightmarish glow, Perry, Holt, Roquet and the rest of A Company kept their heads down and waited tensely for it to all be over. An explosion rocked their foxhole. Dirt, stones, and pieces of hot metal rained in on the three Marines. Wallace Holt, a 21 year old corporal from Grafton, North Dakota stared aghast at the severed stump where his right hand had been. "I won't be able to play baseball anymore!" he yelled to Perry. "My hand's gone!" Holt jumped out of the foxhole and ran for the company aid post. Roquet and Perry lost sight of him in the flashing darkness. The bombardment slackened.
The screaming and chanting grew louder and closer. Up and down the lines, Marines braced themselves for the charge.
They came all right, maybe at about half past two that morning. My company was quite undersized by this time. We were protecting the left flank of the whole bridgehead with about one hundred men.
It was at this time that my barbed wire became invaluable. God, did we pile those Japs up on it!
- Captain Irving Schechter, 1982 interview, quoted in Henry Berry's "Semper Fi, Mac"
The Japanese exploded from the brush less than 30 yards from the Marine lines. Every weapon in the American arsenal began firing almost at once. Tracers flicked overhead, bullets whined through the air, and Japanese troops began to fall in carload lots, but still they came. Big flares hung overhead like chandeliers, casting an eerie greenish-white illumination over the battlefield. The fighting became a bitter toe-to-toe slugfest, each man fully absorbed in what was going on around him.
Captain Schechter was not afforded the luxury of staying still. As Company Commander, he could easily have remained in his command post and directed the defense, but that was not the way "Buck" lead. He had a habit of refusing to wear his helmet in combat, saying that he'd put it on "when things got rough." Every man in A Company was used to the sight of their Captain, helmetless, chewing a piece of grass while making decisions. Now he raced from foxhole to foxhole, encouraging his men, stopping to fire when needed, and boosting their morale.
In the individual holes, personal dramas were being played out. Private Cecil Ray Tolley, 19, a veteran of Namur and Saipan, was dug in near a machine gun crew that was pouring bullets into the mass of Japanese. A grenade sailed through the dark and into their hole, where it exploded. The crew were seriously wounded, and the Japanese were closing on their hole. Losing a machine gun was a serious blow to the company defenses. Tolley raced over to the gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger. He was badly wounded, but before he lost consciousness he singlehandedly burned through four boxes of ammunition - nearly a thousand rounds - and accounted for an unknown number of Japanese. He would survive, and go home to Mississippi with a Navy Cross.
Al Perry was busy, too. He had stocked up with 30 magazines of ammunition for his BAR - each magazine contained 20 rounds - plus additional ammunition in bandoleers. Japanese soldiers were pitching to the ground within arms reach of his hole. The BAR, a rugged weapon, was unable to stand up to the demands placed upon it, and overheated, rendering it useless. Perry flung the weapon down and took advantage of a brief respite to search outside his hole for a discarded BAR. He did not have to go far, but by the time he returned to his hole, Leon Roquet was gone. Perry jumped back in and continued fighting alone.
By 0500, Perry was almost out of ammunition. He paused, collecting up his empty magazines, preparing to load extra rounds from his bandoleers. The American artillery and mortars were beginning to slacken their fire, but the Japanese kept coming. Perry knew he couldn't stop firing long enough to load individual magazines. Fortunately, a Marine he did not know from one of the mortar teams slid into his hole. The 60mm mortars were out of ammunition, he said, and could he help Perry by loading magazines for him? They fought side by side until daylight, Perry shooting anything that moved, and the unidentified Marine calmly loading fresh magazines.
The Japs would yell "banzai" and my men would yell it right back at them, along with some choice obscenities. The most remarkable thing to me was that every single one of my men stayed put. I don't think one of them broke and ran. I was constantly circulating as best I could among these Marines, trying to keep a lid on things.
Then we did get a lucky break. The shells from those two 37 millimeters were devastating. I think the Japs came at us three different times and after the third charge, those 37s ran out of ammunition. I don't know if we could have stopped another charge without those shells.
- Captain Irving Schechter, 1982 interview, quoted in Henry Berry's "Semper Fi, Mac"
With daylight, American tanks began to roll up to the front lines. The Japanese had not cracked A Company's line in more than three hours of assault. Sensing that they were nearly spent, many of the Japanese went rushing forward, screaming "Banzai!" and clutching grenades or antitank mines to their bodies. Up and down the line, Marines pushed beyond the point of horror watched their enemies run forward and burst apart only yards or feet from their foxholes. Everyone was covered in blood and body parts.
Finally, the firing and explosions ceased. Dazed Marines peeked out of their foxholes, and saw that there weren't many of them left. Al Perry was so deafened from the fighting that he couldn't hear the cries of the wounded. He pulled himself out of his hole and went to see who had survived.
PFC Richard J. Brodnicki of Buffalo, NY, was in the first hole Perry checked. Brodnicki had been shot cleanly between the eyes.
PCF Winston McKay Cabe, 24, from North Carolina, lay in the next hole. Perry rolled him over and saw with horror that his good friend was missing most of his face. Cabe was still alive, and Perry screamed for a corpsman. A new "sailor" came running over (most of A Company's medical support had been lost on Saipan; Perry remembered being surprised at how old this man was - maybe 35), took a look, and pulled out his scissors to cut away the hair from where Cabe's nose had been. Suddenly, the corpsman grabbed his stomach and pitched forward, landing dead on top of Cabe. Perry saw that something had torn the man's stomach open; his hands were full of his intestines.
Perry was sure that Cabe was dead. He pulled Cabe's blanket out and covered what remained of his face. As he prepared to say goodbye to his friend, a Japanese soldier who had hidden nearby jumped up and ran towards him, screaming. Perry scarcely had time to react before the man detonated in front of him. He felt something slam into his shoulder, and thought he had surely been hit. When he looked down, he saw the Japanese soldier's severed hand clutching his neck. Perry brushed it away.
Captain Schechter was passing nearby, and shouted at Perry to get back in his hole. Dazedly, he complied.
Four hundred and seventy six Japanese bodies lay sprawled or in pieces within 100 yards of First Battalion. The lion's share was in front of A Company. Many of them would receive awards; Captain Schechter and Private Tolley would receive the Navy Cross. Everyone was content just to be alive.
A Company had dug in the night before with somewhere between 100 and 150 men.
Only thirty of them were still capable of carrying weapons by daylight.
J+1 had just begun.
(Wallace Holt and Winston Cabe were out of the war for good. Cabe lived until 1955; Holt until 1997. George Smith caught up with Holt in the hospital, and Holt proudly demonstrated how he had learned to light a match with only his left hand).
[The identity of the machine gunner posted near Tolley isn't known for sure, though three gunners were wounded on the 25th: Amedeo Izzo, Howard Kerr, and William Pettyjohn. These three were veterans of Namur and Saipan, and although their MOS lists them as ammunition carriers, it's very possible that they were grouped together as a squad after the number of casualties the platoon took on Saipan. Also, none were returned to combat after being evacuated, which points towards much more serious wounds.]
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