A battalion commander with a pistol in each hand — walking upright into the largest banzai charge of the entire Pacific War.
Saipan, summer of 1944. Lieutenant Colonel William O'Brien had already done things most officers would never attempt once. He climbed onto an American tank that was firing on his own men — in full view of the enemy. He crossed 1,200 yards of sniper-infested jungle completely alone. Each time, he had every reason to stay behind the lines. Each time, he went forward.
Then, before dawn on July 7th, between three and five thousand Japanese soldiers charged straight at his eleven hundred men. The line broke. Communications collapsed. And O'Brien made a choice that would define the 105th Infantry Regiment forever.
Three men from the same regiment were put forward for the Medal of Honor after that morning. The story of how they earned it is not one you forget easily.
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Saipan, summer of 1944. Lieutenant Colonel William O'Brien had already done things most officers would never attempt once. He climbed onto an American tank that was firing on his own men — in full view of the enemy. He crossed 1,200 yards of sniper-infested jungle completely alone. Each time, he had every reason to stay behind the lines. Each time, he went forward.
Then, before dawn on July 7th, between three and five thousand Japanese soldiers charged straight at his eleven hundred men. The line broke. Communications collapsed. And O'Brien made a choice that would define the 105th Infantry Regiment forever.
Three men from the same regiment were put forward for the Medal of Honor after that morning. The story of how they earned it is not one you forget easily.
Subscribe for forgotten WW2 stories ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@ww2dispatchh
Like if you think this story deserves to be remembered.
Comment below — where are you watching from?
#worldwar2 #ww2 #militaryhistory #ww2stories #ww2dispatch
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LearningTranscript
00:00June 20th, 1944. 0730. Lieutenant Colonel William O'Brien stood behind the front line on Saipan
00:08and watched three American Sherman tanks swing their guns away from the enemy and fire directly
00:14into his own men. 44 years old, 27 years in uniform. He had trained these soldiers since
00:231940. 32,000 Japanese defenders had fortified every cave, ridge, and sugarcane field across
00:31Saipan's 12 miles of jungle and coral. In the first five days of the invasion, they had killed
00:38or wounded thousands of Marines and Army soldiers. The landing beaches alone had cost hundreds of
00:44American lives in the opening hours. The island was devouring men faster than any battle in the
00:50Pacific. The crisis on this morning was simple and lethal. Japanese machine guns and mortars poured
00:58such intense fire that the three tank commanders sealed their turrets shut. With hatches bolted
01:05and periscopes fogged by tropical heat and coral dust, the crews inside lost all sense of direction.
01:11They could not tell American positions from Japanese ones, and they were pumping 75-millimeter high
01:17explosive shells into the infantry they were supposed to protect. O'Brien's men had no way to reach
01:24the tankers inside. No shared radio frequency linked foot soldiers to armor on Saipan. Hand signals were
01:31invisible through buttoned-up periscopes. Shouting was useless over engine noise and machine gun fire. Men who had
01:39survived five days of Japanese bullets were being torn apart by their own tanks.
01:45The 105th Infantry was a National Guard regiment from upstate New York. Factory workers, store clerks,
01:53and farmers from Troy, Cohoes, and Albany, who had been federalized in 1940 and shipped to the Pacific.
02:00Their first taste of combat came on Macon Atoll in the Gilbert Islands. That fight lasted four days.
02:08Saipan would last 25. And it would cost the regiment more men than anyone had imagined.
02:16O'Brien had risen from private to battalion commander inside the 105th. Enlisted at 18 in 1917. Sergeant by the
02:24end of the First World War.
02:26Commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1926. Lieutenant Colonel by April 1943. Commanding the same unit he had
02:34joined as a teenager, 26 years earlier. Saipan was the most heavily fortified island American forces had yet
02:41assaulted in the Pacific. Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito commanded the garrison, 26,000 Imperial Army troops and
02:496,000 naval personnel. Two years of preparation had produced concrete bunkers with interlocking fields of fire,
02:57artillery concealed inside natural caves that naval bombardment could not penetrate, and mortar coordinates
03:03zeroed on every open approach. Saito's orders from Tokyo left no room for interpretation.
03:10Hold the island. Kill every American. Die before surrendering.
03:17The Marines had hit the western beaches on June 15. The 27th Division landed the following day.
03:23By June 20, the pattern of this battle was set. Japanese soldiers fought from concealed positions.
03:30Caves, spider holes, bunkers carved into coral ridgelines. They let Americans cross open ground,
03:38then ripped into them with crossfire from two and three directions. At night came bayonet charges and
03:44grenades rolled into foxholes. Each dawn revealed fresh American dead in the cane fields and along the
03:52jungle trails. O'Brien's 1st Battalion had taken casualties every day since pushing inland from the
04:00ground. The soldiers picked off men from treetops and cave mouths at distances where the shooter was
04:04invisible. Mortar rounds found positions that appeared safely defilated. The advance was measured
04:11in yards per hour. The cost was measured in men per day. And on this morning, the three tanks sent
04:19forward to break a Japanese strongpoint had turned their blind guns on the Americans behind them.
04:25The turrets were sealed. The crews could see nothing. No one on the ground could make them stop.
04:32What O'Brien did next should not be forgotten.
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04:46Back to O'Brien.
04:48O'Brien drew his Colt .45. He left cover and stepped into the open. Fully exposed to Japanese
04:55machine guns, mortar fragments, and the wild shells from his own blinded tanks. Then he ran. Straight
05:04toward the lead Sherman across open, fire-swept ground. No radio. No signal flares. Just a pistol and the hope
05:13that he could reach that turret and pound on the steel hard enough for someone inside to hear him.
05:18Before a Japanese sniper put a bullet through him first.
05:22O'Brien reached the lead Sherman at a full sprint.
05:26He hammered the turret hatch with the butt of his Colt, pounding the steel until two crewmen cracked it open.
05:32He climbed onto the hull, fully exposed to Japanese machine guns and mortars, and began directing the tank by hand.
05:39He pointed toward the enemy's strongpoint. The turret traversed. The 75mm gun fired. This time, it hit the right target.
05:48He stayed on top of that tank until the Japanese position was destroyed.
05:53Standing upright on the hull with no cover, while mortar fragments sparked off the turret below him.
05:59The strongpoint fell.
06:01O'Brien's men moved forward. The immediate crisis was over.
06:04But Saipan still had 20 more days of killing ahead.
06:09What happened at the tanks told his battalion something they would remember.
06:12Their commander did not lead from a rear command post.
06:16He went to where the fire was worst.
06:18Over the next eight days, the 105th pushed north through terrain the Japanese had turned into a killing ground.
06:26Every ridgeline hid machine gun positions.
06:28Every gully, concealed mortar crews.
06:32Men were killed by fire they never saw coming.
06:36The battalion's casualty reports grew longer each evening.
06:39O'Brien walked the forward positions daily, checking fields of fire and repositioning squads before dark.
06:46He was a former store clerk from Troy, New York.
06:49Not a West Point graduate.
06:51His men expected a battalion commander to stay behind the lines and issue orders through runners.
06:56O'Brien went forward instead.
07:00In a National Guard regiment, sometimes dismissed as weekend soldiers by the regular army,
07:06that earned something no rank could buy.
07:09By June 28th, the advance had stalled at a fortified ridge near the village of Donne.
07:15The Japanese had packed it with machine gun nests covering every approach
07:19and at least one 77mm field gun dug into the reverse slope.
07:25Two attempts to take the ridge by frontal assault had failed.
07:29American soldiers crossing the open ground below were cut down before they reached the base.
07:35The ridge commanded the route north.
07:37Until it fell, the entire battalion was stuck.
07:41O'Brien rejected a third frontal attack.
07:44He planned a double envelopment.
07:46Two combat groups would swing wide around both flanks of the ridge
07:50and strike the Japanese from behind,
07:52while a holding force pinned the defenders from the front.
07:55On paper, a textbook maneuver.
07:58On Saipan, in dense jungle and broken coral against an enemy dug into caves with overlapping fire lanes,
08:05it required coordination that bordered on impossible.
08:09Both flanking groups had to push through thick underbrush without radio contact,
08:14reach their assault positions at the same time, and attack together.
08:17If one element hit too early, the Japanese would mass their fire against it.
08:22If either group got lost, the plan collapsed.
08:26And one critical platoon was already pinned down on the far side of 1,200 yards of sniper-infested terrain.
08:34Someone had to reach that platoon, take command, and lead them into position for the assault.
08:39The 1,200 yards between O'Brien and that platoon had already stopped every runner the battalion sent.
08:46Japanese marksmen controlled the canopy.
08:48They fired from treetops, from behind root systems, from spider holes, invisible until a man stepped over them.
08:57The underbrush was so thick that movement meant noise.
09:01Noise drew bullets.
09:04O'Brien did not send a runner.
09:06He did not call for a patrol.
09:09He would cross the 1,200 yards himself.
09:12Alone.
09:14A lieutenant colonel walking so low through jungle that snipers had turned into a shooting gallery.
09:20But his men were trapped on the far side.
09:23Without that platoon in position, the double envelopment would fail.
09:26Without the envelopment, the ridge would hold.
09:30And every day it held, more Americans died in frontal attacks that everyone knew could not succeed.
09:37At first light on June 28th, O'Brien stepped off the trail and into the underbrush.
09:43No escort.
09:45No covering fire.
09:46Gunshots would have marked his position for every sniper in the canopy.
09:50Just his 45 and 1,200 yards of jungle where the enemy was watching from the trees above.
09:57O'Brien crossed the 1,200 yards in just over an hour.
10:00Moving low through the underbrush.
10:03Stopping when he heard movement above.
10:05Pressing forward when the jungle went silent.
10:08Japanese snipers were in the canopy for most of the crossing.
10:11He reached the far side without being spotted.
10:14The pinned platoon was exactly where he expected.
10:18Caught between the ridge and the jungle.
10:20Taking fire from above.
10:21Unable to advance or pull back without exposing themselves to the machine guns.
10:26O'Brien took command the moment he arrived.
10:29From this angle, behind the Japanese line, he could see what the frontal assaults had missed.
10:35A narrow ravine cut up the back slope of the ridge, hidden from the machine gun positions that covered the
10:41front.
10:42The Japanese had built their defenses to face an enemy coming from the south.
10:46They had not expected anyone to approach from behind.
10:50O'Brien left a group of soldiers in position to keep the Japanese occupied with fire from below.
10:55Then, he picked four men and led them into the ravine.
10:59The five of them climbed in single file.
11:02The walls were steep coral, so narrow that two men could not walk side by side.
11:07The space gave them cover from the guns above, but if the Japanese heard movement and dropped grenades into that
11:13slot, there was nowhere to run.
11:16One grenade would have killed all five.
11:19They reached the top of the ridge.
11:21The Japanese defenders were still firing downhill toward the American holding force.
11:26Their backs were exposed.
11:28O'Brien and his four men hit them from behind.
11:38When it was over, O'Brien's five-man team had captured five heavy machine guns and one 77mm field gun,
11:46the weapons that had stopped an entire battalion for days.
11:50A position that cost dozens of casualties in two failed frontal assaults fell to five men approaching from a direction
11:58the enemy never anticipated.
12:00O'Brien wasted no time.
12:02He organized both platoons into a defensive perimeter on the crest of the ridge before dark.
12:08On Saipan, taking ground was only half the problem.
12:11Holding it through the night was the other half.
12:15The Japanese counterattacked that night, and the next.
12:19Waves of soldiers came up the slopes in the darkness, probing for gaps in the perimeter.
12:24O'Brien directed the defense through both nights, shifting men to meet each thrust, redistributing ammunition as supplies ran low.
12:33The ridge held.
12:36By the morning of June 30th, the position was firmly in American hands.
12:40The men of the 105th started calling it Obie's Ridge.
12:45What O'Brien had done in eight days—the tank, the crossing, the ridge—marked him as the kind of officer that
12:52combat soldiers talk about in whispers.
12:55A man who went forward, when everyone else was looking for cover.
12:59But Saipan was not finished with him.
13:01The worst was still ahead.
13:03By the end of June, American forces had compressed the remaining Japanese defenders into a narrow pocket along the island's
13:10northern coastline.
13:12Weeks of fighting had ground the garrison down to fewer than 4,000 effective troops.
13:17The rest were dead, scattered in caves, or too wounded to fight.
13:21The survivors were starving, ammunition was running short, medical supplies had been exhausted days earlier.
13:29But those 4,000 men were not surrendering.
13:32Japanese military doctrine offered only one option for troops who could no longer retreat and refuse to yield.
13:38A final attack.
13:40All out.
13:41No expectation of survival.
13:44Every man advancing until he was killed, taking as many of the enemy with him as possible.
13:50O'Brien's 1st Battalion received orders in early July to push north along the western coast toward the Tanapag Plain.
13:58The terrain was flat and open, a quarter mile of level ground between the ocean and the inland ridgelines.
14:06It was good defensive ground if the enemy came at them across that open space.
14:10It was a death trap if they came in numbers too large to stop.
14:15On the evening of July 6th, O'Brien's 1,100 men dug in along the Tanapag Plain.
14:22Japanese forces were massing somewhere in the jungle to the north.
14:26Intelligence estimated their numbers.
14:27What intelligence could not estimate was their intent, or the scale of what was about to come.
14:35In a few hours, O'Brien would face more enemy soldiers in a single assault than most American officers encountered
14:42in the entire war.
14:43On the evening of July 6th, inside a cave on Saipan's northern coast,
14:49Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito knelt on the stone floor and dictated his final order.
14:54Every soldier, sailor, and able-bodied civilian, still alive in the Japanese pocket, would attack the American lines before dawn.
15:03There would be no retreat. There would be no surrender.
15:07Each man was expected to kill at least seven Americans before dying for the emperor.
15:13Saito drew his sword and committed seppuku.
15:16Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the same officer who had commanded the carrier strike force at Pearl Harbor two and a
15:22half years earlier,
15:23shot himself in an adjacent cave.
15:26The two senior Japanese commanders on Saipan died within minutes of each other,
15:30having set in motion the largest bonsai charge of the entire Pacific War.
15:35The order filtered through what remained of the Japanese command.
15:39Surviving officers gathered their men in the jungle north of the Tanapag plain.
15:44Soldiers who could still walk formed ranks.
15:48Wounded men who could not walk strapped grenades to their bodies.
15:52Sailors with no infantry training picked up rifles from the dead.
15:56Civilians were handed sharpened bamboo poles.
16:00Sake was distributed to those who would drink it.
16:04The force that assembled in the darkness numbered between 3,000 and 5,000.
16:09Many carried no firearms.
16:12Some had only bayonets lashed to wooden poles.
16:16A few held officers' swords.
16:19What they lacked in weapons they intended to replace with numbers and the absolute willingness to die.
16:26Directly in their path sat the 1st and 2nd battalions of the 105th Infantry,
16:31dug into foxholes and fighting positions across the Tanapag plain,
16:35roughly 250 yards inland from the beach.
16:39The defensive line had a critical weakness.
16:42A gap existed between the two battalions.
16:45A seam where the 1st battalion's right flank and the 2nd battalion's left did not fully connect.
16:52In daylight, overlapping fields of fire could cover that opening.
16:56In darkness, against a mass charge, the seam was a door the enemy could walk straight through.
17:04O'Brien understood the risk.
17:05The plane was flat and open, good for shooting, but with nothing to fall back to once a position was
17:11overrun.
17:13Behind the infantry sat jeeps with mounted .50 caliber machine guns.
17:18Further back, artillery batteries were positioned for fire support.
17:22But if the Japanese breached the infantry line and reached those guns, the batteries would be lost.
17:29Everything depended on the riflemen holding their ground in the dark.
17:32The men of the 105th tried to sleep that night.
17:36Most could not.
17:38Sounds drifted across the plain from the north.
17:41Movement in the jungle.
17:42Voices chanting.
17:44The scrape of metal on metal.
17:46Something was building out there.
17:49The soldiers in their foxholes checked their ammunition, fixed bayonets, and waited.
17:55At 0445 on July 7th, the jungle exploded.
18:00Thousands of Japanese soldiers burst from the tree line and charged across the open ground toward the American foxholes.
18:05The first wave came shoulder to shoulder.
18:08A wall of screaming men, some firing rifles from the hip, some swinging swords, some clutching sharpened bamboo.
18:17Behind them, a second wave.
18:19Then a third.
18:20The sound drowned out the opening volleys of American rifle fire.
18:24A continuous roar of human voices rolling across the plain like nothing these soldiers had ever heard.
18:30The American line opened up with everything it had.
18:34Machine guns, rifles, grenades, mortars.
18:37The front ranks of the charge fell in heaps.
18:40But the men behind them did not slow.
18:43They climbed over the dead and kept coming.
18:46The sheer mass of the assault absorbed losses that would have shattered any conventional attack
18:51and still carried enough momentum to keep surging forward.
18:55The Japanese found the seam between the battalions.
18:58Hundreds poured through the gap.
19:00Splitting the American line in two.
19:02Forward positions were cut off from the rear.
19:05Within minutes, the organized perimeter collapsed into dozens of isolated pockets.
19:11Clusters of Americans firing outward in every direction,
19:14surrounded by enemy soldiers flooding past them in the dark.
19:18Communications collapsed.
19:20Company commanders lost contact with platoons.
19:24Platoon leaders lost contact with squads.
19:26The battle dissolved into a hundred separate fights scattered across the Tanapag plain.
19:32And in the middle of it all stood O'Brien, right at the front, exactly where the wave hit hardest.
19:39O'Brien did not fall back when the line broke.
19:41He did what his men had seen him do at the tanks and on Donne Ridge.
19:46He went forward.
19:47With a pistol in each hand, he walked the shattered American line, not crouching, not running for cover, walking upright,
19:57firing at Japanese soldiers as they poured through the broken perimeter, stepping over the fallen, moving from one cluster of
20:03survivors to the next.
20:05His presence changed the calculus for the men around him.
20:09In the chaos of a shattered defense, no radio, no chain of command, no way to know who was alive
20:15and who was dead, each foxhole was making its own decision.
20:19Hold or pull back.
20:21Fight or run.
20:23The only thing keeping them together was a man walking upright through the gunfire, shooting with both hands, and telling
20:30them to hold their ground.
20:32Don't give them a damned inch.
20:34The words carried between the gunshots and the screaming and the crack of bamboo spears against rifle stocks.
20:42Men who had been seconds from breaking heard their battalion commander's voice in the dark.
20:47Some stopped falling back.
20:49Some turned around and fought.
20:52Around O'Brien, the battle had become something most American soldiers had never experienced.
20:58Close-quarters combat against an enemy not trying to take ground, but simply to kill as many men as possible
21:05before dying.
21:07Japanese soldiers threw themselves bodily at machine gun positions.
21:11They grappled with Americans in foxholes.
21:14The fighting was hand-to-hand, bayonet against bayonet, rifle butt against sword.
21:20The darkness made it worse.
21:23Men could not tell friend from enemy until close enough to touch.
21:27The 1st Battalion's perimeter was collapsing inward.
21:31Positions on the flanks were overrun one by one.
21:34Soldiers on the edges were killed or pushed back toward the center.
21:39Some men from the 2nd Battalion, completely cut off, fought their way to the beach and swam through the surf
21:45to American destroyers offshore.
21:47The only escape left.
21:50Artillery batteries behind the front tried to respond.
21:53Gun crews leveled their howitzers and fired canister rounds, shells packed with hundreds of steel balls,
21:59directly into the onrushing mass at point-blank range.
22:03Each round tore a hole in the Japanese ranks.
22:06Each hole filled within seconds as more men surged through.
22:10O'Brien kept walking the line, firing at Japanese who broke through, shouting over the noise,
22:16pulling wounded Americans behind cover, directing survivors into improvised positions.
22:22Then a bullet hit him in the shoulder.
22:24He stumbled, caught himself, and kept firing.
22:28A medic reached him.
22:30O'Brien waved off evacuation.
22:32The medic bandaged the wound while O'Brien continued shooting with both hands.
22:37Blood soaked through the dressing within minutes.
22:40He ignored it.
22:43Across the Tanapag Plain, the attack had been raging for nearly two hours.
22:47The Japanese had pushed more than a thousand yards through and beyond the American positions.
22:53Scattered pockets of resistance dotted the battlefield.
22:56Some holding, some being overwhelmed, some already silent.
23:01The 105th was being torn apart.
23:05Private Thomas Baker of the 105th was among the surrounded.
23:09Baker had fired every round in his rifle, then swung it as a club until the wooden stalks shattered against
23:14a Japanese soldier's helmet.
23:16Badly wounded and unable to move, he told the men carrying him to prop him against a tree facing the
23:22enemy.
23:23He asked for a loaded pistol and a cigarette.
23:27They found him hours later.
23:29Dead.
23:30The pistol empty.
23:32Eight Japanese soldiers at his feet.
23:35O'Brien's ammunition was nearly gone.
23:37Both colts were running dry.
23:39The Japanese were still pressing in.
23:42Not in organized waves now, but in a continuous flood of men pushing past every position that still held.
23:48Then O'Brien saw the jeep.
23:51Sitting behind what had been the forward command post.
23:54Mounted on its back was a Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun, the heaviest weapon within reach.
24:01The gun was loaded.
24:02The belt was full.
24:04The position was completely exposed with no cover from any direction.
24:08And the Japanese were less than 50 yards away.
24:11O'Brien climbed onto the jeep.
24:14The Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun was bolted to a mounting post behind the driver's seat.
24:19No gun shield.
24:21No armor plate.
24:22No sandbags.
24:24Standing upright behind it, a man was visible from the chest up to every rifle and machine gun on the
24:30Tanapag plane.
24:31O'Brien gripped the spade handles, charged the bolt, and pressed both thumbs down on the butterfly trigger.
24:38The Browning fires half-inch rounds at nearly 3,000 feet per second.
24:43At the range O'Brien was shooting, 10 yards, 20, 30, each round tore through the charging soldiers with enough
24:51force to pass through multiple bodies.
24:53The effect on massed infantry in the open was devastating.
24:57He swept the gun across the Japanese ranks, surging past his position.
25:02The muzzle flash lit the pre-dawn darkness in rapid strobing bursts.
25:07Brass casings cascaded off the jeep's hood.
25:09The barrel glowed white with heat.
25:12The Japanese saw him.
25:14An American officer, standing fully upright on a jeep, alone, firing a heavy machine gun directly into their ranks at
25:22point-blank range.
25:23They turned toward him.
25:25Rifles cracked.
25:27Bullets punched into the jeep's fenders and hood.
25:29O'Brien did not stop.
25:32He traversed the gun in wide, sweeping arcs, pouring half-inch rounds into the mass of soldiers surging around him
25:39from every direction.
25:40His stand at the gun bought time that saved lives.
25:44Behind him, survivors from both battalions, who had been driven from their foxholes, used those minutes to fall back, regroup,
25:52and form a second defensive line.
25:54Men who had been fighting alone in the dark now had somewhere to go.
25:58O'Brien's .50 caliber was the only barrier between the Japanese flood and the Americans retreating behind him.
26:06The men who pulled back were the last to see William O'Brien alive.
26:11He was standing upright behind the browning, firing into the wall of soldiers closing on him from three sides.
26:18The gun was still hammering when the wave swallowed his position.
26:22The battle raged across the Tanapag Plain for 12 more hours after O'Brien was overrun.
26:29By mid-morning, the Japanese charge had begun losing momentum.
26:33The waves thinned as their casualties mounted beyond anything even a suicide attack could sustain.
26:40American artillery hammered the open ground.
26:43Destroyers offshore poured naval gunfire into the Japanese flanks.
26:48Marines from the 4th Division counterattacked from the east.
26:52By 1,800 hours on July 7th, every yard of ground lost at dawn had been retaken.
26:59Then came the count.
27:01Japanese dead covered the plain in rows and heaps.
27:05Burial teams worked for days.
27:09In front of the 105th's original line, they counted 2,295 bodies.
27:14Behind the line, across the ground the charge had overrun, another 2,016.
27:224,311 Japanese soldiers killed on a single day.
27:27It was the deadliest Banzai attack of the war.
27:31The 105th paid a price that nearly erased two battalions from existence.
27:38406 soldiers dead.
27:40512 wounded.
27:42More than 900 casualties out of the men who had held the line at dawn.
27:47The regiment lost over 80% of both battalions in 15 hours of fighting.
27:54One of the highest single-day casualty rates of any American unit in the Pacific.
28:00O'Brien's body was found near the jeep.
28:03He was still behind the gun.
28:06Around him lay roughly 30 dead Japanese soldiers.
28:10Men he had cut down in his final minutes before the position was overwhelmed.
28:15His body bore multiple bullet wounds and bayonet marks.
28:19He had not left the weapon.
28:21He had fought until there was nothing left to fight with.
28:25Two days later, on July 9th, Saipan was declared secure.
28:29But for the survivors of the 105th, the 7th of July would define their regiment forever.
28:35Three of their dead were put forward for the Medal of Honor.
28:38O'Brien, Baker, and a regimental dentist named Captain Benjamin Solomon,
28:43who had manned a machine gun over the bodies of his patients until the Japanese killed him at the gun.
28:49Whether those three men would receive the nation's highest honor was a question that would take months to answer.
28:54And in one case, more than half a century.
28:58The Medal of Honor for Lieutenant Colonel William J. O'Brien was approved on May 9th, 1945,
29:04ten months after his death on the Tanapag Plain.
29:08The award was authorized by Act of Congress and signed by President Harry Truman.
29:13The official citation recognized all three engagements across 18 days on Saipan.
29:18It was one of the rare awards in the war earned for sustained heroism over multiple separate actions rather than
29:26a single moment.
29:27The public presentation ceremony took place on May 27, 1945, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York,
29:36O'Brien's hometown, the city where he had enlisted at 18, and served for nearly three decades before shipping out
29:43to the Pacific.
29:45Hundreds of residents from Troy and the surrounding towns attended.
29:49Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson placed the medal around the neck of O'Brien's widow, Marjorie.
29:56Their son, William Jr., stood beside her.
29:58He was six years old.
30:01He had been five when his father left for Saipan and never came home.
30:06The boy would grow up knowing his father only through the stories of the men who fought beside him and
30:12survived.
30:13Private Thomas Baker received his Medal of Honor the same day.
30:18Baker, the soldier found dead against the tree with an empty pistol and eight Japanese at his feet,
30:24had been killed within hours of O'Brien.
30:26His family received the medal at a separate ceremony.
30:30Recognition for the broader sacrifice of the 105th was complicated by inter-service controversy.
30:37During the Saipan battle, Marine Lieutenant General Holland Smith had relieved the 27th Division's commanding officer,
30:43Army Major General Ralph Smith, accusing the Army troops of advancing too slowly.
30:48The resulting dispute, known among military historians as the Smith vs. Smith affair,
30:54cast a shadow over the division's combat record that lingered for years.
30:59The men who had held the Tanapag plane and buried 80% of two battalions felt the criticism was a
31:05bitter insult to their dead.
31:08Captain Benjamin Solomon's case was more painful still.
31:11Solomon had been the regiment's dentist.
31:13When the battalion surgeon was wounded, he volunteered to run the aid station.
31:19During the Banzai attack, Japanese soldiers broke into the tent where he was treating casualties.
31:24Solomon killed the first attacker with a medical instrument, shot a second with a wounded man's carbine,
31:30then ordered every patient evacuated.
31:32He seized a water-cooled .30 caliber machine gun and covered their retreat, alone.
31:38His body was found at the gun.
31:41He had died stopping the Japanese from reaching the men he was sworn to protect.
31:46But Solomon's Medal of Honor recommendation was denied.
31:49The Geneva Convention restricted medical officers to pistols or rifles in self-defense.
31:55Solomon had fired a crew-served machine gun, classified as an offensive weapon.
32:00The Army ruled that honoring a medical officer for manning a heavy weapon would set a dangerous precedent.
32:07The paperwork was shelved.
32:10For decades, surviving veterans of the 105th petitioned to reopen the case.
32:15Letters went to Congress.
32:17Military review boards examined the record.
32:20The argument never changed.
32:23Solomon gave his life to protect men who could not protect themselves.
32:27At Fort Drum in New York, the O'Brien Readiness Training Center was named in his honor.
32:34The facility were soldiers of the New York National Guard's 27th Infantry Brigade trained to this day.
32:41The Army transport ship USAT Colonel William J. O'Brien carried his name across the Pacific after the war.
32:50In Troy, a memorial honoring O'Brien and Baker was installed in the Rensselaer County Office Building in 2009.
32:59Two Medal of Honor recipients from the same small city killed on the same island within hours of each other.
33:07But by the turn of the century, the survivors of July 7th were nearly gone.
33:13The men who had watched O'Brien walk the line under fire were in their 80s and 90s.
33:20The men who had seen Solomon drag patients from the aid station were dying of old age without seeing him
33:26honored.
33:27And the question of whether a dentist, who gave everything at a machine gun,
33:32would ever receive the nation's highest military decoration was still unanswered,
33:3756 years after he had earned it.
33:40In 2002, 58 years after Captain Benjamin Solomon died at his machine gun on the Tanapag Plain,
33:49the United States government corrected the record.
33:52On May 1st, Solomon was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
33:56The Geneva Convention objection that had blocked the award for more than half a century was finally set aside.
34:04The review board concluded that Solomon had acted as a medical officer, defending his patients,
34:10and that the weapon he used did not diminish the sacrifice he made.
34:14By then, nearly every man who had fought beside Solomon on July 7th, 1944, was gone.
34:22But the handful of survivors who remained, men in their 80s and 90s,
34:26the last witnesses to what happened on the Tanapag Plain,
34:30lived long enough to see all three of their brothers recognized.
34:34Three Medal of Honor recipients from a single regiment, in a single battle, on a single day.
34:39O'Brien, Baker, Solomon.
34:42A battalion commander, a private, and a dentist.
34:46Each faced the same impossible choice on the morning of July 7th.
34:50Fall back or hold.
34:52Each chose to hold.
34:54None survived.
34:56The battlefield on Saipan's Tanapag Plain is quiet today.
35:00The flat ground where the charge swept through the American lines before dawn is covered in tropical vegetation.
35:06The foxholes have filled in.
35:08The shell craters have softened into the earth.
35:11The jeep where O'Brien fired his last rounds is long gone.
35:14But for anyone who knows what happened here on the morning of July 7th, 1944, the ground still speaks.
35:23The 105th Infantry, the National Guard Regiment from upstate New York that held the line against the largest bonsai charge
35:30of the Pacific War,
35:31never fully recovered from that morning.
35:34The regiment was reorganized after the war.
35:36The men who survived carried July 7th with them for the rest of their lives.
35:41Most never spoke about it publicly.
35:43Some could not bring themselves to try.
35:46William O'Brien Jr. grew up in Troy without his father.
35:49He carried the name and, through the veterans who visited the family over the years,
35:54learned the story of what his father had done across 18 days on Saipan.
35:59The Medal of Honor that Marjorie received in 1945 became a family heirloom,
36:04a piece of medal that held the full weight of a sacrifice a five-year-old could not have understood
36:09when his father said goodbye.
36:11Most Medal of Honor citations describe a single act, one moment of extraordinary courage under fire.
36:18O'Brien's covers 18 days in three separate engagements, each more dangerous than the last.
36:25Each time, he had a reason to stay behind the lines.
36:28Each time, he went forward.
36:31That pattern, the absolute refusal to lead from safety when his men were under fire,
36:36is what sets his story apart from nearly every other citation of the war.
36:40He was not reckless.
36:43He was not seeking glory.
36:45He was a 44-year-old former store clerk with a wife and a young son waiting at home.
36:51But every time his soldiers were in danger,
36:54he placed himself between them and whatever was trying to kill them.
36:58On the tank.
36:59In the jungle.
37:01Behind the machine gun.
37:03Until there was nothing left.
37:05Lieutenant Colonel William Joseph O'Brien died on the Tanapag Plain on July 7th, 1944.
37:12He had spent 27 years in the United States Army.
37:16He had risen from private to battalion commander.
37:20And on the last morning of his life, he gave every round, every breath, and every second he had left
37:26so that the men behind him could survive.
37:29You just spent 44 minutes with a man who gave everything for his soldiers.
37:35That means something.
37:37If this story stayed with you, please hit like.
37:40It is the single best way to help more people find it.
37:43Subscribe and ring that notification bell so the next story lands right in your feed.
37:48Drop a comment and tell me where you are watching from.
37:51I read every single one.
37:53And if someone in your life served, or simply loves history, send them this video.
37:58O'Brien, Baker, and Solomon never made it home.
38:03Keeping their names alive is the one thing we can still do for them.
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