A corpsman remembers Saipan, Pacific landings

[CountDeMoney]

Culotta recalls horror of Pacific landings
Young Navy corpsman saw Marines stacked up, Japanese mass suicide

By Frederick N. Rasmussen

June 14, 2009

"I still think about Saipan because it was the worst one," recalled Samuel A. Culotta, a Baltimore lawyer and frequent Republican candidate, who spent World War II in the Pacific as a Navy corpsman.

Culotta, 84, was a veteran of nine island landings that stretched from Makin Atoll to Kwaajalein, Eniwetok, Okinawa and the Philippines.

The hellish memories of five days on Saipan in the Mariana Islands are as fresh as they were 65 years ago, Culotta said. He likened the June 15, 1944, invasion, to an almost "forgotten D-Day," with 3,500 Americans killed and thousands wounded.

Culotta's road to war was like that of many Americans.

Caught in the grip of the Depression, he dropped out of City College to help support his family and went to work at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point yard building Liberty ships.

His father, a barber, and mother, a union seamstress, lived with their four sons in a rowhouse in the 1300 block of N. Broadway.

"The day after Pearl Harbor, I tried enlisting in the Marine Corps, but they wouldn't take me because I had flat feet, so I went to work building ships," he said.

Watching his friends sign up for the service only increased his resolve to get into the war.

"Because I was 17, I needed the signatures of my parents, and my father refused to sign," he said.

"My mother finally told him that I wanted to go, that I wanted to serve my country and saw it as my duty. Finally, he began crying like a baby, and said that 'signing that paper was like signing your death warrant,' " Culotta recalled.

"During the physical, they stuck a wooden tongue depressor under my feet. Guess what? No flat feet," he said with a laugh. "On June 22, 1942, I finally got in the Navy," he said.

Scoring high on a test, Culotta was selected to be trained as a corpsman. Soon thereafter, he was on his way to the Pacific in early 1943.

On May 30, 1944, he was aboard the attack transport USS Frederick Funston, which was part of the armada that departed Pearl Harbor for the invasion of Saipan.

Culotta, who compiled an account of the time, described the troops aboard the Funston as being "generally in good spirits, discussing the forthcoming operation, cleaning their guns and gear, some playing cards, some reading books."

He wrote that religious services that were held every day had "very good attendance."

In the early hours of June 15, Culotta wrote that a "dull outline of the islands was visible and at some distance it was obvious that they were getting a terrific bombardment from our task force as star shells, tracers and fires were noticeable."

By 6 a.m., all landing craft were lowered into the water, and two hours later, the command was given to head for shore.

Japanese shells fell nearer and nearer to the boats with shrapnel flying in all directions. Miraculously, there were no serious injuries, Culotta wrote.

Culotta went ashore in the first wave with the 2nd Marine Division and was horrified to see the beach littered with the dead and dying.

"It was horrible. Already the bodies were bloating in the hot sun, and within two or three hours, they would be unrecognizable," Culotta said in a telephone interview the other day.

The corpsmen's job, Culotta explained, was to stabilize the wounded until they could be taken to hospital ships.

"That's what we were trained to do. We corpsmen had a saying: 'If you were alive when we got to you, you stayed alive,'" he said.

"But I remember so many of their faces and seeing dead Marines stacked like cordwood," he said.

"One of the guys had been hit in the carotid artery. There was nothing we could do for him. Nothing. Because we knew within a minute and a half, he'd be gone.

"The dying would call for their mothers," he said. "By then, I was 19, and had been through five invasions. We did what we could, but we couldn't save them all. You just never get accustomed to it."

As day faded into night, the Japanese continued attacking until Navy destroyers moved closer and ended the enemy counterattack.

"If they had not done that, I wouldn't be here," Culotta said.

"Nothing was ever more welcome than the first signs of daylight, for we knew that with its arrival, we would be able to drive the Japs back into the hills," he wrote. "There was a prayer of thanks in all our hearts that we made it through the night."

As American forces advanced in early July, Lt. Gen. Saito Yoshitsugu, commander of the 30,000-strong Japanese garrison on Saipan, committed suicide. Suicidal counterattacks by his soldiers left only 1,000 survivors.

Culotta watched as the island's civilians hurled themselves to their deaths from the high cliffs at Marpi Point. "We couldn't stop them. Some survived the fall but not many. We just couldn't stop them," he said.

Culotta's last invasion was Okinawa in April 1945.

When the war ended on V-J Day, he was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard enjoying 30 days' leave.

"We took the subway from Brooklyn to Times Square, and we all got drunk. What a wild scene, and I kissed plenty of girls that night, too," he said, with a laugh.

Discharged on Sept. 29, 1945, Culotta returned to Baltimore and hitchhiked to his family's new home in the 7400 block of Belair Road.

"My parents didn't know I was coming home, and when I came into the house, my father broke down. My mother didn't. She was always the stoic one," he recalled.

Culotta said there were plenty of reasons to be thankful that day because he and his three brothers, Tony, Joe and Pete, had survived the war.

[jimmy olsen]

Man that must have been unbearable, here's to him and all our other brave men who served.

[lustindarkness]

I hope he wrote a diary/book of it.