On the morning of July 8th, 1944, American commanders walked into a scene on the island of Saipan that defied all military logic. They were standing in the aftermath of the largest suicidal bonsai charge in the history of the Pacific War. The jungle floor was carpeted with thousands of bodies, a gruesome mosaic of mud, blood, and twisted metal.
But amidst this slaughter, one specific foxhole stopped the generals cold. They found a forward aid station, a medical tent meant for healing, not killing, and slumped over a heavy machine gun dead from 76 separate bayonet and bullet wounds, was a man named Benjamin Salomon. He wasn’t a ranger. He wasn’t a marine commando.
He was a dentist. A man who had spent his life fixing cavities and worrying about gum disease. But what lay around his lifeless body shattered reality. Piled in front of his machine gun, clogging the tent entrance and stacked inside the medical station itself were the bodies of 98 Japanese soldiers.
One man, one dentist, 98 confirmed kills. The math didn’t make sense. A dentist isn’t trained to fight a battalion. But on that night, Ben Salomon didn’t just fight. He became the most lethal man on the island of Saipan. How does a gentleman trained to save lives end up ending nearly a hundred of them in a single hour? To understand the nightmare of that morning, we have to go back to the hell that created it.
Most heroes are born in fire, but Ben Salomon was born in Milwaukee. If you looked at him in 1937, you would see the least dangerous man in America. He was quiet, unassuming, an Eagle Scout who obeyed every rule and wrote letters to his mother. He was studying dentistry at the University of Southern California, worrying about exams and root canals while the rest of the world held its breath for war. Friends described him as the guy you’d want as a neighbor.
Reliable, softspoken, incapable of violence. When the draft notice came in 1940, Ben didn’t run. He joined the infantry. And here is the first strange twist of fate in a story full of them. This quiet dentist turned out to be a prodigy with a rifle. In basic training, he picked up a weapon and scored expert marksman.
He picked up a pistol and scored expert again. His commanding officers were baffled. They had a naturalborn shooter on their hands, a man with ice water in his veins, and perfect hand eye coordination. But the army, in its infinite bureaucracy, looked at his college degree and made a decision. His hands were too valuable for a trigger. They belonged in a mouth.
Ben was transferred to the dental corps. He was assigned to the 105th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division. They called themselves the New York Division, but the Marines fighting alongside them had a different name for them. They called them the Shopkeepers. The 27th had a reputation, and it wasn’t a good one.
They were seen as slow, cautious, lacking the killer instinct needed for the brutal island hopping campaign against the Japanese Empire. Ben Solomon was a dentist in a division that everyone else thought was soft. But they were headed for an island that would break the hardest men on Earth, Saipan. It wasn’t just another jungle rock in the middle of the ocean.
to the Japanese high command. This was the final line of defense. It was considered part of the Japanese homeland. If the Americans took Saipan, their new B29 Superfortress bombers would be within range of Tokyo itself. The emperor knew this. The generals knew this.
And the 31,000 Japanese soldiers defending the island were given a simple, terrifying order. No surrender. Every man dies fighting. Every man takes 10 Americans with him. Into this meat grinder walked the dentist. The invasion began on June 15th, 1944. If history remembers Omaha Beach as a nightmare, Saipan was the apocalypse. The Japanese had presited every inch of the landing zone with artillery and mortars.
When Ben Salomon waited ashore with the 105th Infantry, the lagoon was already red with blood. But Ben wasn’t on the front line. Not yet. As the regimental dentist, his job was to stay back, set up a sterile tent, and pull infected teeth. He was supposed to treat gum infections caused by the tropical heat and stress.
But war rarely follows a job description. The casualties in the first week were catastrophic. The American advance was brutal, yard by bloody yard against an enemy that refused to retreat. Within days, the second battalion’s chief surgeon was wounded by shrapnel. The replacement surgeon was killed instantly by a sniper.
Suddenly, the 105th Infantry had hundreds of wounded men pouring in and no doctor to treat them. This is the moment Ben Salomon stopped being just a dentist. He stepped forward and told the commanding officer, “I can do it.” He put down his dental mirror and picked up a scalpel. For weeks, he worked 20our shifts. He wasn’t fixing teeth anymore.
He was digging jagged metal out of legs, sewing up chest wounds, and holding the hands of boys dying in the mud. He learned triage in the dark. He learned to ignore the screaming. It is critical to understand this transformation. Ben Salomon spent weeks saving lives.
He saw the horror of what Japanese weapons did to American bodies. Every boy who died on his table, every letter home he had to write for a deceased soldier. It changed him. The gentle dentist was hardening. The Eagle Scout was seeing the raw face of evil. And somewhere inside him, the expert marksman was waking up. By early July, the Americans had pushed the Japanese army to the northern tip of the island to a place called the Tanipag Plane.
The Japanese were trapped against the sea. They were starving. They were out of ammunition. They were eating snails and tree bark to survive. Logic dictated that they should surrender. Any other army in the world would have raised the white flag. But the Imperial Japanese Army did not operate on logic. They operated on the code of Bushidto.
On July 6th, the situation had become desperate for the Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Yoshiugu Saito. He was sick, frail, and living in a cave. He knew the end was near. He issued one final order to his crumbling army, a document that chills the blood even today. He wrote, “We will advance to attack the American devils and die a death of honor.
Each man will kill 10 Americans before he dies.” On the American side, the 105th Infantry, Ben Salomon’s unit, was moved to the front line on the western coast. They were told to dig in for the night. They were tired. They were complacent. They thought the Japanese were finished. Intelligence reports said the enemy was disorganized and incapable of offensive action. Those reports were wrong.
Dead wrong. Less than 1,000 yds away, in the darkness of the ravines, a human tide was gathering. It wasn’t just soldiers. It was the walking wounded. Men with no rifles, armed only with rocks and spears made of bamboo. Men with bandages wrapped around their heads, limping on crutches.
Even civilians joined the ranks. 3,000 souls. They were not planning a battle. They were planning an avalanche, a suicide charge designed to overwhelm the Americans through sheer weight of numbers. Captain Salomon set up his aid station just 50 yards behind the frontline foxholes. In hindsight, this was a fatal mistake, but the terrain left him no choice. The ground was cramped and the ravines were steep.
He had 30 severely wounded men in his tent. He was running low on morphine. As the sun went down on July 6th, a strange, heavy silence fell over the Tanipag plane. Veterans will tell you that the jungle is never silent. If the insects stop buzzing, it means something is hunting. Ben Salomon checked his patients. He cleaned his instruments.
And then he did something unusual for a medical officer. He checked his M1 Garand rifle. He field stripped it, oiled the action, and loaded a fresh clip. He checked his pistol. Maybe he felt it. A vibration in the ground. A shift in the air. The dentist was getting ready. At 04:45 a.m. on July 7th, the sun hadn’t risen yet.
The 105th Infantry was asleep or groggy in their foxholes. Suddenly, a sound tore through the darkness. It started as a low rumble, like a freight train approaching from deep underground. Then, it turned into a scream. A scream from 3,000 throats at once. Tenno hikah bonsai. Long live the emperor. It was the largest bonsai charge of the Pacific War. They didn’t come in waves.
They came as a solid wall of humanity. They crashed into the American perimeter like a tsunami. The frontline foxholes of the 105th were overrun in seconds. American machine gunners fired until their barrels melted. But the Japanese just climbed over the dead bodies of their comrades to get to the Americans. It was hand-to-hand combat immediately.
Knives versus swords, bayonets versus spears, helmets used as bludgeons. Inside the aid station, Ben Salomon heard the screaming. He heard the wet thud of bodies hitting the ground. Suddenly, the tent flap burst open. A soldier rushed in, but it wasn’t an American asking for help. It was a Japanese soldier wielding a bayonet, his eyes wide with the madness of the charge. Salomon didn’t hesitate.
He was unarmed, holding a medical kit. Instinct took over. He lunged forward, grabbing the Japanese soldier’s rifle barrel with his left hand, diverting the blade inches from his chest. With his right hand, he snatched a heavy metal medical pot and smashed it into the attacker’s skull. The soldier crumpled.
Salomon grabbed a nearby M1 rifle lying on a cot and put two rounds into the fallen enemy. But as the gunshot echoed in the small tent, Salomon looked up through the open tent flap, illuminated by the hellish glow of flares outside, he saw them, dozens of them. The front line had collapsed. The safe rear area was now the front line.
And between the charging horde and the 30 helpless, bleeding men in his tent stood only one man. At that moment, Ben Salomon made a choice that would cost him his life and earn him a place in legend. He turned to his wounded patients, men who could barely stand, and shouted, “Everybody who can walk, get out. Go back to the regiment.
I’ll hold them off. I’ll hold them off. One man against an army. The dentist picked up his rifle. He filled his pockets with ammunition. He stepped out of the tent and walked directly into the nightmare. The man who had spent his life fixing smiles was about to unleash hell.
Ben Salomon stepped out of that medical tent and into a world that had ceased to make sense. The air was thick with smoke, the smell of cordite, and the metallic tang of blood. It wasn’t just a battle anymore. It was a riot of violence. But in this chaos, the dentist found a brutal clarity. He realized instantly that if the Japanese overwhelmed his position, the 30 wounded men crawling away behind him would be butchered. He was the bottleneck.
He was the only thing standing between the retreating wounded and the advancing horde. The first few minutes outside the tent were a blur of close quarters desperation. Salomon didn’t start with a machine gun. He started with a rifle he had scavenged from a casualty. He took a knee behind a pile of crates, scanning the darkness. Shapes were moving through the smoke.
Screaming figures with bayonets fixed. He fired, reloaded, fired again. His movements were mechanical, precise. The muscle memory of the expert marksman taking over the hands of the surgeon. He wasn’t panicking. While other men were breaking under the sheer psychological terror of the bonsai charge, Salomon was calculating angles.
He spotted four Japanese soldiers crawling through the underbrush near the tent’s right flank. They were trying to cut off the retreat. Salomon stood up exposed to enemy fire and engaged them. One shot, two shots, three, four, all targets down. But for every soldier he dropped, three more appeared from the gloom. The sheer weight of numbers was suffocating.
He needed more firepower. He needed something that could stop a wave. 50 yards ahead, he saw it. a heavy machine gun position. It was an American M1917 Browning water cooled machine gun, a beast of a weapon capable of firing 600 rounds per minute. But the gun was silent. The crew lay dead around it, cut down in the opening seconds of the charge.
The weapon sat there, unmanned, pointing directly into the heart of the Japanese advance. Salomon didn’t hesitate. He threw down his rifle and sprinted across the open ground. Bullets kicked up dirt around his boots. He dove into the foxhole, landing on top of the dead gunners. He didn’t have time to mourn them. He grabbed the handles of the heavy machine gun.
It was hot to the touch. He checked the ammo belt. It was loaded. He racked the bolt. This was the moment the battle changed. The Japanese thought they had broken the line. They thought the path to the beach was clear. They were wrong. They had just woken up a monster. The M1917 roared to life. The sound was deafening.
A continuous rhythmic hammering that cut through the screams of the bonsai charge. Salomon swept the barrel left to right, spraying a cone of lead into the ravines where the enemy was thickest. The effect was devastating. The first wave of attackers clustered together in a tight mass was shredded. They fell in heaps tripping over each other.
But still they came. This is where the story defies belief. A machine gun is usually operated by a team of three or four men. One to fire, one to feed the ammunition belt, one to spot targets, and one to carry cooling water. Ben Salomon was doing it all alone.
He was firing with one hand, feeding the belt with the other, kicking empty ammo crates out of the way with his feet. For the next hour, Ben Salomon became a magnet for every Japanese soldier in the sector. They saw the muzzle flash. They knew that this one gun was the anchor of the American defense. They turned their fury toward him. The first wound came early.
A Japanese bullet slammed into his leg. The impact would have knocked a lesser man unconscious, but Salomon barely flinched. He tied a tourniquet around his thigh, gritted his teeth, and kept firing. The pain must have been blinding, but adrenaline is a powerful drug. He knew that if he stopped firing for even 10 seconds, the enemy would be on top of him.
Then came the second wave. This wasn’t a mindless charge. This was a coordinated attack to take out the gun. A squad of Japanese soldiers flanked him from the right. They crept up through the tall grass, using the noise of the battle to mask their approach. Salomon didn’t see them until they were 30 yards away.
He swiveled the heavy gun, the tripod groaning under the strain, and unleashed a burst of fire. He caught them in the open. But one soldier managed to throw a grenade before he died. The explosion rocked the foxhole. Shrapnel tore into Salomon’s shoulder and chest. He was thrown backward, his ears ringing, blood pouring from multiple wounds.
Most men would have stayed down. Most men would have played dead and prayed for the end. Ben Salomon pulled himself back up to the gun. His uniform was soaked in blood. His left arm was useless, hanging limp at his side. He used his good arm to traverse the gun, firing in short, controlled bursts.
He wasn’t just shooting blindly into the night. He was shifting the gun’s position. He realized that if he stayed in one spot, the Japanese mortars would zero in on him. So between waves of attacks, this wounded dentist, bleeding from half a dozen holes, dragged the heavy machine gun, which weighed over 100 lb with its tripod and water jacket, to new positions.
He would fire for 10 minutes, then drag the gun 10 yard to the left, fire again, drag it to the right. To the Japanese commanders watching from the ridge, it must have seemed like they were facing an entire platoon of machine guns. They didn’t know it was just one dying man refusing to let go of the trigger. By 06 out, the ammunition began to run low. Salomon had fired thousands of rounds.
The barrel of the gun was glowing red hot. The water in the cooling jacket was boiling off, sending plumes of steam into the air, marking his position even more clearly. He had to scavenge. He crawled out of his foxhole, moving among the dead bodies of the American soldiers he had tried to save earlier.
He stripped ammo belts from their bodies. He found rifles and grenades. He dragged everything back to his nest. It was during one of these supply runs that he was hit again. Another bullet to the stomach. The damage was catastrophic. At this point, Ben Salomon was a dead man walking. He had lost too much blood.
His organs were failing, but his mind was still sharp. He knew he wasn’t going home. He knew he would never see Milwaukee again. He would never open that dental practice. The only thing left to do was to buy time. Every minute he held this position was another minute for the disorganized American forces behind him to regroup.
Every Japanese soldier he killed was one less enemy heading for the main hospital tents in the rear. He crawled back to the gun. His vision was blurring. He was running on pure will. The Japanese realized that bullets weren’t stopping him, so they decided to rush him. A group of soldiers led by an officer with a sword charged directly at the foxhole.
They were screaming, sprinting through the devastating fire. Salomon waited. He waited until they were so close he could see the sweat on their faces. He waited until he could see the whites of their eyes. Then he held the trigger down. The machine gun hammered. The officer disintegrated.
The soldiers behind him fell like dominoes. But one of them got close enough. A bayonet thrust. It pierced Salomon’s side. Salomon didn’t let go of the gun. He turned the weapon point blank on the attacker. The blast blew the soldier backward. Salomon was now fighting handto hand while operating a crew served weapon. He was bleeding from at least 20 wounds.
He was surrounded by a ring of dead bodies that was growing higher and higher, actually blocking his field of fire. He had to pause to push the corpses of his enemies out of the way so he could keep shooting. Think about that image. a lone man surrounded by a wall of the dead, pushing them aside just to kill more.
It is a level of primal violence that the human mind struggles to comprehend. As the sun began to rise, the battlefield was illuminated in a gruesome gray light. The Japanese attacks became more desperate. They could see him now. They saw a lone figure slumped over the gun. His white medical coat turned completely red.
They must have thought he was a demon. How could a human being sustain that much damage and keep fighting? Around 06:30 a.m., Captain Salomon realized the end was coming. He had one ammo belt left, maybe 200 rounds. He could hear the Japanese regrouping for a final massive push.
They were gathering in the treeine, hundreds of them, preparing to swarm the position once and for all. He looked back toward the command post. It was quiet. The wounded had escaped. The regiment had fallen back to a secondary line of defense. He had done his job. He could have tried to crawl away into the bushes. He could have tried to save himself in these final moments.
But Ben Salomon didn’t move an inch. He adjusted the tripod one last time. He checked the feed tray. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the smoke of the battlefield. He knew what was coming, and he was ready to meet it. The final wave hit at 0645. It was a tidal wave of bodies. They came from the front, the left, and the right. Salomon opened fire.
The gun chattered its death rattle. He swept the barrel back and forth, desperate to hold them back for just one more second, just one more heartbeat. We don’t know his final thoughts. We don’t know if he thought of his family or his home or the men he had saved. All we know is what the evidence told us later.
We know that he kept firing until the belt ran dry. We know that even when the gun clicked empty, he didn’t surrender. When the ammunition was gone, he stood up. He drew his pistol. He fired until it was empty. He threw the empty pistol at the rushing soldiers. He picked up a knife. The last thing Ben Salomon did on this earth was fight.
He fought with bullets, then with steel, and finally with his bare hands. He fought until his heart stopped beating. He fought until the sheer number of bayonets overwhelmed him. He went down under a pile of enemy soldiers, still swinging, still defiant. The gun fell silent. The screaming stopped.
The dentist of Saipan was dead, but the silence that followed was heavy. The Japanese soldiers who survived that assault stood over his body in shock. They looked at the carnage around this one foxhole. They looked at the 98 of their own comrades lying dead in a semicircle around this single man.
They must have wondered what kind of warrior they had just killed. They didn’t know he was a doctor. They didn’t know he was a gentle soul who loved classical music. They only knew they had met a god of war. For the next few hours, the battle raged on elsewhere, but the position held by Ben Salomon remained quiet. The Japanese didn’t push past him.
He had broken the spine of their attack in that sector. His one-man stand had shattered their momentum. By the time the American forces launched their counterattack later that day, the enemy was spent. But the story doesn’t end with his death. In fact, the true mystery and the tragedy was just beginning.
Because when the American reinforcements finally retook the position on the afternoon of July 8th, what they found was so unbelievable, so grotesque in its scale that the army initially refused to believe it. The officers who walked up to that foxhole saw the body of Captain Salomon. They saw the heavy machine gun, the barrel warped from the heat, and they began to count. 1 5 10 20 50. The count kept going. They counted bodies piled in the tent.
They counted bodies stacked like sandbags in front of the gun. They counted bodies in the ravines. 98 98 enemy soldiers, one American. The regimental commander stared at the scene, his face pale. He turned to his aid and said, “I have never seen anything like this in my life.” He immediately pulled out his notebook and began to write a recommendation. He was writing a recommendation for the Medal of Honor.
It was the most obvious, clear-cut case for the nation’s highest award that anyone had ever seen. But Ben Solomon wouldn’t get the Medal of Honor. Not that day, not that year, not even in that century. Instead, the file on Ben Salomon would disappear. The recommendation would be rejected.
The hero of Saipan would be buried and his story would be buried with him. The reason, a technicality, a bizarre bureaucratic rule buried deep in the Geneva Convention that said medical personnel could not bear arms against the enemy. The army looked at the 98 dead bodies and said, “A doctor isn’t allowed to do that.
” And so, the man who saved a regiment was erased from history. For 50 years, his file gathered dust in a Pentagon basement. For 50 years, the men he saved grew old, had children and grandchildren, while the man who gave them that chance was forgotten. But the truth has a way of fighting its way to the surface, just like Ben Salomon fought his way through that night.
It would take a new generation of investigators, a relentless push for justice, and a battle against the military bureaucracy to finally uncover what really happened in that foxhole. The smoke cleared over Saipan on July 8th, 1944. The sounds of screaming and machine gun fire were replaced by the heavy mechanical rumble of bulldozers burying the dead.
But while the physical battle for the island was ending, a new war was just beginning. This wasn’t a war fought with bullets or bayonets. It was a war fought with paper, red tape, and a military bureaucracy that refused to believe what had happened in that foxhole. When the division commander, General George Grryer, inspected Ben Salomon’s position, he knew he was looking at a Medal of Honor action. The evidence was undeniable.
98 enemy bodies, one defender. It was the definition of conspicuous gallantry above and beyond the call of duty. Grryer wrote the recommendation immediately. He gathered witness statements from the wounded men Salomon had saved. He detailed the timelines. He sent the packet up the chain of command, expecting a swift approval.
Instead, the recommendation hit a brick wall. The packet landed on the desk of Major General Robert Richardson. Richardson was a stickler for the rules and he found a problem, a massive legal problem. Captain Ben Salomon was a medical officer. He wore the red cross brassard on his arm. Under the Geneva Convention, medical personnel are classified as non-combatants.
They are allowed to carry weapons, but only for self-defense and the defense of their patients. Richardson argued that manning a heavy machine gun and killing 98 people looked a lot like offensive action. He argued that by picking up that weapon, Ben Salomon had violated the Geneva Convention. The general’s logic was cold and absolute.
A doctor cannot be a machine gunner. If the army awarded the Medal of Honor to a dentist for slaughtering enemy soldiers, it would strip the Red Cross of its neutrality. It would endanger medical personnel in every future war. So, the recommendation was denied. Think about the cruelty of that decision. Ben Solomon had died protecting the helpless.
He had stood his ground when combat infantrymen had run away. And now the very institution he died for was telling him that he had done his job too well. They were saying that if he had killed five people with a pistol, he might be a hero. But because he killed 98 with a machine gun, he was a war criminal.
The file on Ben Salomon was closed. It was shoved into a cardboard box and sent to the military archives in St. Louis. And then in 1973, a massive fire ripped through those archives. Millions of service records were turned to ash. It seemed that the story of the dentist of Saipan was destined to disappear forever. Just smoke and rumors whispered by old veterans at reunions. Decades passed.
The men of the 27th Division grew old. The world moved on. We fought in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf. The name Ben Salomon meant nothing to the modern army. But history has a way of haunting us. In the late 1990s, a man named Dr. Robert West picked up the scent.
West was also a dentist and an alumnest of the same USC dental school where Salomon had studied. He had heard the rumors of the hero dentist and couldn’t let it go. He felt a personal duty to find the truth. Dr. West began a crusade. He teamed up with military historians and dug through the surviving records.
They found copies of the original witness statements that had escaped the fire. They found the original casualty reports. And most importantly, they found the ballistic analysis from 1944. Dr. West built a legal case. He argued that the general’s rejection in 1944 was based on a lie. He proved using the position of the bodies that Ben Salomon was not on the offensive. He hadn’t hunted the Japanese.
They had overrun him. He was defending a fixed position against a suicide charge. The machine gun wasn’t a tool of aggression. It was a shield for the wounded men crawling away behind him. The fight took years. The army resisted. The Pentagon didn’t want to reopen a case from half a century ago. They told Dr.
West to give up, but he didn’t. He rallied congressmen. He rallied the surviving members of the 27th Division. He turned Ben Salomon’s name into a political battering ram. Finally, in 2002, the walls crumbled. The Secretary of the Army reviewed the new evidence and admitted the mistake.
They acknowledged that the interpretation of the Geneva Convention had been wrong. Ben Salomon hadn’t violated the rules of war. He had exemplified the highest tragedy of war that sometimes to save lives, a healer must become a killer. On May the 1st, 2002, 58 years after he died in the mud of Saipan, Ben Salomon was invited to the White House. Obviously, Ben couldn’t be there.
He had no wife. He had no children. His bloodline had ended in that foxhole. So, a distant relative, a cousin named Dr. Robert West, the very man who fought for his legacy, stood in the Rose Garden. President George W. Bush stood at the podium. The sun was shining.
The Marines were standing at attention, and the president read the citation. He spoke of the 98 enemy soldiers. He spoke of the wounds. He spoke of the sacrifice. Captain Ben Salomon, the president said, was a dentist who just wanted to fix teeth. But when the hour of darkness came, he stood tall. The president handed the Medal of Honor to Dr. West.
It was the final Medal of Honor awarded for World War II. The last chapter of the greatest conflict in human history was closed by a dentist. Today, if you go to the University of Southern California School of Dentistry, you will see the medal on display. Students walk past it every day on their way to class.
Most of them are worried about exams, about tuition, about their future careers, just like Ben was in 1937. They look at the photo of the gentleman in the wire rimmed glasses and they see themselves. But Ben Solomon represents something terrifying and beautiful inside all of us. He proves that we don’t truly know who we are until the sky falls.
He proves that a man who spends a lifetime healing can in a single heartbeat become a warrior capable of stopping an army. He didn’t want to be a hero. He didn’t want to be a killer. He just wanted to make sure his patients got home. And for that, he paid the ultimate price. 98 enemies, one dentist, no surrender.
This is the story the history books tried to forget. But we remember. If this story shook you, if you believe that Ben Salomon deserves to be known by the entire world, do your part right now. Hit that like button. It helps the algorithm push this hero’s story to millions of people who have never heard his name.
Thank you for remembering. We’ll see you in the next
