Silver Star recipient recalls battle for Saipan

He was in the Marshall Islands when he found that soldier’s wallet and opened it up.

“I saw a picture of a Japanese family, a young Japanese family,” the 92-year-old Marine veteran said as he sat in the den of his Las Vegas home last week with his Silver Star and Purple Heart medals framed in a shadow box behind him.

“That really hit me because I thought here I am, a young American about 21 years old. This Japanese looks like he’s 21 or 22 years old. He’s standing with a woman and a child. I’m thinking I eliminated his life,” he said, pausing for a couple of seconds. “I didn’t like the thought of that. It was only because of fate that he had not eliminated my life.

“And that’s what war is all about. Either you kill, or you are killed. What a horrible thing to live with,” he said.

As the turret gunner on a medium-size Sherman tank, Smith and the other four Marines in his crew killed between 80 and 100 Imperial Japanese soldiers on June 17, 1944, during the Battle of Saipan. That’s according to reports from ground troops who saw the bodies around Japanese gun emplacements that Smith’s tank targeted during what he said was a “hectic, chaotic,” seemingly endless morning.

“I’ve got to confess. With that big cannon and those .30-caliber machine guns, I was responsible for a lot of lives, never with any joy or pleasure. But for those being killed, I could have been killed and I’m surprised that I wasn’t. … Don’t forget the Japanese were just as devoted to their cause as we were to ours.”

HIDDEN AWAY

For 70 years Smith has lived with that on his mind.

For 45 years he seldom talked about it until one day after he moved to Las Vegas in 1989 with his wife, Dorothy Ann. She found his medals in a drawer with his “Marine Corps stuff” and asked how he had earned them. She wondered why they were hidden in a drawer instead of on display in a special place in their new home.

“I didn’t meet him until after the war,” she said. “We’ve been married for 62 years and I never knew he had Silver Star until about 25 years ago.”

But “Smitty,” as his Marine buddies called him, doesn’t consider himself a hero.

“There are so many guys who have individually done brave things, really brave heroic things,” he said. “This was not a heroic operation. This was something that was called upon us because of the training we had.”

Nevertheless, he said, “It was about as fierce of an operation as you can ever get into because we were out-gunned and we were scared to death.”

LANDING ON SAIPAN

The 4th Division Marines had landed on a Saipan beach with a primary objective to take control of the airstrip on the 12-mile-long island. It was vital for U.S. B-29 Superfortress bombers to hopscotch for attacks on Japan, 1,300 miles away. Before the battle would end on July 9, 1944, more than 3,400 Americans would die with another 10,350 wounded.

The big, dual-purpose Japanese guns had been pounding the Marines for a couple of days, preventing them advancing toward the airstrip.

“The conditions were they had to keep it; we had to have it. That got us set up for a pretty good fight,” Smith recalled.

To pinpoint the location of the Japanese guns, Smith’s tank was selected to be a sole decoy to go more than 500 yards in the open basin to attract enemy fire and “kick ’em around a little bit.”

“The first thing we saw was the blue flame of a gun firing at us,” he said. “We thought, ‘Holy mackerel! What have we walked in to?’ … So the commander tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Smitty, did you see that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I saw it.’ He said, ‘Well, do something about it.’

“So I put a heavy explosive 75 mm shell in the midst of that first gun and, frankly, blew it all to hell. He was happy. I was happy.”

As several more shells hit around them, it was obvious the battle was just beginning. But because the emplacements were stationary and the tank could move, Smith’s crew could literally dodge the incoming shells while fixing their sights on nonmoving targets, at least for a while.

“So we jig-jagged to the left and jig-jagged to the right and kept going one way or another. But I kept on whatever guns I could see because I had command of that turret,” he said. “I was scared to hell. I figured, ‘Boy. We’ve stepped into something that we’re not going to get out of because the odds are too great. But for some reason or another, luck was with us and our movements kept them from sighting in on us directly.”

Smith proceeded to see targets, turn the turret and “keep firing. And the loader keeps shoving new shells in the breech and I keep firing and the noise is horrendous.”

“We ran over a few emplacements. We ran into some. We were running over people. We knew that,” he said. “We were in the midst of a battle and we didn’t know how big it was, and didn’t know how it was going to end up. … I didn’t honestly think we were ever going to get out of there.”

THOUGHTS OF HOME

At one point his mind “went back to my civilian days and I began to think of things I was going to miss: a certain girl, a dance. Things like that.”

“We were creating mayhem (but) now we were being hit. The tank shakes a bit every time we get hit. … (Then) one finally hit us in the tracks and stopped us dead.”

An armor-piercing shell ignited some gun powder on the turret floor.

“The commander, I remember his words now: ‘Let’s get the hell out of here boys!”

Up went the hatch and five guys poured out the top of the tank and landed at its side. Smith had a broken arm. He couldn’t grab his .45-caliber pistol from his shoulder holster, so one of his buddies did, chambered a round for him, “and I became a left-handed shooter,” he said.

“Then, thank goodness we heard the roar of another tank, and another one steaming up the same path we had followed.”

With that, Smith’s crew managed to slowly escape back 500 yards to the safety of ground troops who were on the crest of a hill and ready to take over the airfield.

He would fight again in the Battle for Iwo Jima, and the Silver Star he received for action on Saipan became an afterthought.

Today, on Veterans Day, Smith said he will be “thinking about how sad it is that we continue to devise more weapons of destruction.”

“These guys who are coming back now are missing arms, legs, things like that. … I think that’s tragic. I’m going to be thinking about that more than anything else and wondering why in heaven’s name must we so-called civilized people continue to eliminate each other as we seem to be doing,” he said.

“Good God. At this stage in our lives we shouldn’t be doing this. We should be living in peace and why aren’t we?”