Four American soldiers lay dead around it.
The gun was still operational.
Solomon reached the machine gun position.
He checked the weapon.
The barrel was hot but not warped.
The water jacket was intact.
An ammunition belt fed into the receiver.
He estimated 200 rounds remaining, maybe more.
He grabbed the gun by its handles and pulled it toward a better position.
10 yards forward behind a small rise that would give him cover and a clear field of fire.
He dragged the bodies of the four dead Americans with him.
He positioned them as sandbags around the gun.
It was not respect, it was necessity.
He settled behind the weapon.
The Japanese were still coming.
Wave after wave.
Some wore uniforms.
Some wore rags.
Some were wounded and could barely walk.
They came anyway.
Officers with swords.
Soldiers with rifles.
Civilians with bamboo spears.
They screamed as they charged.
Solomon opened fire.
The Browning roared.
30 caliber rounds tore through the advancing Japanese.
Men fell.
The gun kicked against his shoulder.
He held it steady.
Short bursts.
three to five rounds.
Conserve ammunition.
Pick targets.
Leading soldiers first, officers next, anyone carrying a weapon.
The belt fed smoothly through the mechanism.
Brass casings ejected and piled up beside him.
The barrel glowed orange in the pre-dawn darkness.
The Japanese kept coming.
Solomon kept firing.
His training as a machine gunner came back immediately.
Traverse left.
Traverse right.
overlapping fields of fire.
Deny them an approach route.
Make them pay for every yard.
Bodies piled up in front of his position.
10, 20, 30.
The attack did not slow.
More Japanese soldiers appeared from the darkness.
They climbed over their own dead to reach him.
Solomon felt something hit his leg.
He looked down.
Blood.
He had been shot.
He did not know when.
He kept firing.
Another impact.
His shoulder.
He ignored it.
The browning was everything now.
Keep the belt feeding.
Keep the barrel cool.
Keep firing.
The wounded Americans were still evacuating behind him.
They needed time.
He would give them time.
The ammunition belt ran out.
Solomon reached for another.
His hands were covered in blood.
His blood or someone else’s.
He could not tell.
He loaded the new belt.
The gun jammed.
He cleared it.
Started firing again.
The Japanese were closer now.
20 yards.
15.
He could see their faces.
Young men, old men, desperate men.
He killed them all.
Dawn broke over Saipan.
The sky turned gray, then pink, then orange.
Solomon had been firing for over an hour.
His position was surrounded by Japanese dead.
He estimated 60, maybe 70.
He had lost count.
More were coming.
He could see them forming up for another charge.
His ammunition was running low.
He had been shot multiple times.
He could feel his strength fading.
The machine gun was his only friend now.
As long as it kept firing, he kept living.
The sun rose higher.
The temperature climbed.
Saipan in July was brutally hot.
The machine gun barrel glowed white.
Water in the cooling jacket boiled.
Steam hissed from the vents.
Salomon fired in shorter bursts now.
The barrel could not handle sustained fire anymore.
Three rounds.
Pause.
Three rounds.
Pause.
Each burst dropped another Japanese soldier around him.
The battle raged across the entire second battalion front.
The Japanese bonsai charge had torn a hole through American lines.
The first battalion was being overrun.
The second battalion was fighting for survival.
Scattered groups of American soldiers held isolated positions.
Some foxholes still had defenders.
Others were silent.
The Japanese kept pushing south toward the beach, toward the supply dumps, toward the artillery positions.
Salomon could not see the bigger picture.
He only knew his sector, the ground in front of his machine gun.
Japanese soldiers kept appearing from the smoke and dust.
He killed them.
They fell.
More appeared.
He killed those two.
The pile of bodies in front of his position grew larger.
80.
90.
He stopped counting.
His job was simple.
Keep firing until the gun stopped or he stopped.
Another bullet hit him.
His right arm.
He switched to firing with his left hand on the trigger.
His right hand worked the ammunition belt.
Blood ran down both arms.
His uniform was soaked.
Red mixed with sweat.
He could taste copper in his mouth.
He had been shot in the face.
He did not remember when.
His vision blurred.
He blinked it clear.
The machine gun kept firing.
Behind him, the American line was reforming.
Officers were gathering survivors, pulling men back from forward positions, establishing a new defensive perimeter.
Artillery was firing now.
Heavy shells screamed overhead and exploded in the Japanese rear.
The reinforcements were coming.
The Second Marine Division was moving up from reserve.
Help was on the way, but not yet.
Not for another hour, maybe two.
Solomon did not know any of this.
He only knew the Japanese were still coming.
His ammunition was running critically low.
He had two belts left, maybe 300 rounds total.
At his current rate of fire, that gave him 10 minutes, maybe 15.
Then the gun would be empty.
Then he would be dead.
He felt his position shifting.
The ground beneath him was unstable.
Too much blood, too many bodies.
The machine gun was sinking into the mud.
He tried to reposition it.
His legs would not work properly.
He looked down.
Both legs were bleeding.
Multiple wounds, bullet holes, bayonet cuts.
He could not remember taking those hits.
The adrenaline had masked the pain.
Solomon dragged himself in the machine gun to a new position.
5 yards to the right.
Better elevation, clearer field of fire.
He left a blood trail behind him.
He set up the gun again, loaded a fresh belt, started firing.
The Japanese had not noticed him moving.
They charged the old position.
He cut them down from the flank.
20 more fell.
The bonsai charge was losing momentum.
The Japanese had been attacking for 3 hours now.
Their numbers were thinning.
The initial wave of 4,000 had been reduced to hundreds, then dozens.
American artillery was taking a toll.
Machine gun fire from other positions was tearing them apart.
The charge was collapsing, but it was not over yet.
A group of Japanese soldiers spotted Solomon.
They changed direction, came straight at him.
15 men, maybe 20.
They were close.
25 yd.
20.
Solomon traversed the gun and fired directly into them.
The range was point blank.
The bullets went through multiple bodies.
The group disintegrated.
Three men were still standing.
They kept coming.
Solomon killed two.
The third reached his position.
The Japanese soldier jumped over the dead bodies.
He landed in front of the machine gun.
He raised his rifle with a bayonet.
Solomon was out of time.
The gun was pointed the wrong direction.
He could not traverse it fast enough.
The soldier lunged.
Solomon grabbed the barrel of the gun with both hands.
It was scalding hot.
His skin burned.
He swung the entire weapon like a club.
47 lbs of steel and water smashed into the soldier’s head.
The man dropped.
Solomon repositioned the gun, loaded his last ammunition belt.
He estimated 150 rounds remaining.
The Japanese charge was faltering now.
Groups of soldiers were retreating back toward their lines.
The American artillery had found their range.
Shells were landing among the retreating Japanese.
The bonsai charge was broken, but small groups were still probing American positions, looking for weak points, looking for ways through.
Solomon kept firing.
He would hold this position until the gun ran dry or he died, whichever came first.
He looked at the ammunition belt.
100 rounds left, maybe 90.
He could feel himself getting weaker.
The bleeding would not stop.
He counted his wounds.
Eight that he could see, probably more that he could not.
His right lung was making a strange whistling sound, punctured.
His vision was narrowing.
Tunnel vision, a sign of blood loss.
He had maybe minutes left, maybe less, but the machine guns still had bullets, and Japanese soldiers were still out there.
Solomon kept his finger on the trigger.
As long as one remained, so did the other.
By 0800, the bonsai charge had spent itself.
The Japanese had thrown everything they had at the American lines.
4,000 soldiers, walking, wounded, officers, civilians.
They were broken now.
Scattered groups retreated north toward the remaining Japanese positions.
American artillery pursued them.
Shells landed among the retreating men.
Few made it back.
The second battalion counted their losses.
The first and second battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment had been devastated.
Over 400 men killed, over 500 wounded.
Two entire battalions reduced to scattered survivors.
Officers gathered whoever they could find.
Sergeants counted heads.
The numbers were catastrophic.
Companies that had entered the battle with 150 men could muster 20.
Platoons were gone entirely.
The battalion commander ordered a tactical withdrawal, pull back to defensible positions, reorganize, count ammunition, treat the wounded, establish a new perimeter.
The survivors fell back toward the beach.
They moved slowly, exhausted.
Many were wounded themselves.
They helped each other, dragged the seriously wounded, left the dead where they fell.
They would come back for the bodies later.
Nobody knew what had happened to Captain Solomon.
The last anyone saw him, he was heading toward a machine gun position near the forward line.
That position was now deep inside what had been Japanese- held ground.
The area was still dangerous.
Pockets of Japanese soldiers remained.
Snipers, holdouts, wounded men with grenades.
The Americans could not safely reach that section of the battlefield yet.
The 30 wounded soldiers who had been in Salomon’s aid station made it back to the regimental medical station.
Most survived.
They told the medical staff what they had seen.
Captain Salomon fighting handto hand inside the tent.
Four Japanese soldiers dead at his feet.
Him ordering them to evacuate.
Him grabbing a rifle and walking out of the tent alone.
Nobody knew what happened after that.
The American forces regrouped throughout the morning.
The second marine division moved up from reserve.
Fresh troops, full ammunition.
They began pushing north, slowly, reclaiming the ground lost during the bonsai charge.
Artillery pounded Japanese positions.
Aircraft strafed anything that moved.
The Americans advanced carefully, checking every foxhole, every crater, every body.
By noon, the temperature on Saipan reached 95°.
The sun beat down on the battlefield.
The smell was overwhelming.
Thousands of bodies, American, Japanese, baking in the tropical heat.
Medics moved through the battlefield, checking for survivors.
They found few.
Most of the wounded from both sides had died hours ago.
The Japanese had lost over 4,000 men in the bonsai charge.
It was the largest single attack of its kind in the Pacific theater, and it had failed.
The American lines had bent.
They had not broken.
The reinforcements had arrived.
The perimeter had held.
By 1800 hours on July 7th, the Americans had reclaimed all the ground lost during the attack.
The Japanese were pushed back to their starting positions and then beyond, but the cost had been enormous.
The 105th Infantry Regiment was combat ineffective.
They would need weeks to rebuild.
Replacements would need to be brought in.
Officers would need to be promoted.
Equipment would need to be replaced.
The regiment had been gutted.
As the Americans advanced through the battlefield, they found machine gun positions.
Most had been overrun, gun crews killed, weapons destroyed, Japanese bodies piled around defensive positions.
Evidence of desperate last stands.
Americans who had held their ground and died doing it.
One position caught the attention of a patrol from the 27th Division, a Browning machine gun, still set up, still pointing north.
The gun was surrounded by bodies.
Japanese bodies, dozens of them piled three and four deep.
The patrol approached carefully.
They checked for survivors.
They found none.
Slumped over the machine gun was an American, a captain.
His uniform was soaked with blood.
The patrol leader checked for identification.
Captain Benjamin L.
Solomon, dental corps, second battalion surgeon.
The patrol leader was confused.
What was a dentist doing behind a machine gun? They examined the position more carefully.
The bodies of four American soldiers had been arranged around the gun as cover.
A blood trail led from another position 15 yards away.
Captain Solomon had moved the gun during the battle while wounded.
The patrol counted the Japanese bodies in front of the position.
40, 50, 60.
They kept counting.
The number climbed.
One of the soldiers noticed something.
Captain Solomon’s body was riddled with wounds.
The soldier started counting.
bullet holes, bayonet cuts, the chest, the arms, the legs, the face.
The wounds were everywhere.
This man had been hit dozens of times.
How had he kept fighting? The patrol leader radioed back to battalion headquarters.
They had found Captain Solomon.
He was dead.
The battalion wanted details.
The patrol leader looked at the scene around him.
The machine gun, the bodies, the blood.
He did not know where to begin.
The patrol leader called for Captain Edund G.
Love.
Love was the 27th Division historian.
His job was to document significant events, record heroic actions, gather evidence for awards and commendations.
When Love arrived at the position, he understood immediately why he had been summoned.
Love had seen combat.
He had seen brave men die.
He had documented Medal of Honor actions before, but he had never seen anything like this.
He walked the perimeter of the position slowly, making notes, taking measurements.
The Japanese bodies formed a semicircle in front of the machine gun.
The killing zone extended 30 yards forward.
Nothing had survived in that arc of fire.
Love ordered his team to count the bodies carefully, accurately.
They started at the closest and worked outward.
10, 20, 30.
The count continued.
40 50.
The bodies were stacked in some places.
Men had climbed over their own dead to reach the gun.
60 70 80.
The team kept counting.
When they finished, they recounted to verify.
98 Japanese soldiers lay dead in front of Captain Solomon’s position.
Love then turned his attention to Salomon’s body.
He needed to document everything.
The position of the body, the condition of the weapon, the nature of the wounds.
This was evidence.
It would be needed for the official report.
Love began his examination.
Captain Salomon was slumped over the Browning machine gun.
His hands were still on the weapon.
His finger was near the trigger.
He had died fighting.
Love carefully documented the body’s position.
Then he began counting the wounds.
He started with the most obvious.
Bullet holes.
He found them in the chest, the abdomen, the arms, the legs.
Multiple entry wounds.
Some had exit wounds.
Others did not.
The bullets were still inside.
Love counted methodically.
10 wounds.
15.
20.
He moved to the back of the body.
More wounds.
The shoulders.
The spine.
Captain Salomon had been shot from multiple directions, front, side, back.
He had continued fighting while surrounded.
30 wounds, 40.
Love’s count climbed higher.
50, 60, 70.
When he finished counting bullet wounds, he had documented 76 separate gunshot injuries.
Then Love noticed the bayonet wounds.
These were different from gunshots, puncture marks, slash marks, evidence of close combat.
After Salomon had been shot multiple times after he was likely dying or dead.
The Japanese had continued to attack his body.
Love counted these wounds separately.
He stopped counting after documenting two dozen bayonet marks.
There were likely more.
Love consulted with the battalion medical officer.
They examined the wounds together.
Their conclusion was disturbing.
Based on blood flow patterns and tissue damage, approximately 24 of the wounds had been inflicted while Captain Solomon was still alive, still conscious, still fighting.
The man had been shot and stabbed two dozen times, and he had kept firing the machine gun.
Love interviewed the survivors from Salomon’s aid station, the 30 wounded soldiers who had escaped.
They described what they saw.
Salomon fighting handto hand, killing four Japanese soldiers with his bare hands and bayonet, ordering them to evacuate, walking out of the tent with a rifle.
Every witness statement corroborated the others.
The story was consistent.
Love gathered eyewitness accounts from other soldiers who had seen Salomon during the battle.
A sergeant reported seeing him firing the machine gun at 0600.
The position was already surrounded by Japanese dead.
A corporal saw him repositioning the gun at 0700.
The man was clearly wounded, blood visible on his uniform, but he kept firing.
Love documented the blood trail.
It showed that Salomon had moved the machine gun at least twice during the battle, dragging the 47-lb weapon while wounded, setting it up in new positions, maintaining his field of fire.
The blood trail was substantial, evidence of severe hemorrhaging.
Most men would have collapsed.
Solomon had kept fighting.
Love compiled his findings into a detailed report.
He included witness statements, photographs of the position, a sketch map showing the location of bodies, technical analysis of the wounds, estimation of ammunition expended, timeline of events, everything needed for an official recommendation.
On July 10th, 1944, Brigadier General Ogden J.
Ross reviewed Love’s report.
Ross was the assistant commander of the 27th Division.
He had authority to recommend awards.
He read the report carefully.
Then he read it again.
The evidence was overwhelming.
Captain Benjamin L.
Salomon had performed an action worthy of the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the United States.
Ross signed the recommendation.
He forwarded it to Major General George W.
Grryer.
Grryer was the commanding general of the 27th Division, Final Approval Authority.
The recommendation reached Griner’s desk on July 12th.
Grryer read it.
He studied the evidence, the witness statements, the photographs, the body count.
Everything pointed to extraordinary heroism.
Then Grryer noticed something in Captain Salomon’s service record.
Dental corps, medical officer, non-combatant status.
Grryer consulted the Geneva Convention.
Article 24.
Medical personnel are protected persons.
They may not bear arms against the enemy.
Salomon had not only borne arms.
He had used a machine gun, a crew served weapon, an offensive weapon system.
Grryer made his decision.
He denied the recommendation.
His official statement was clear.
Captain Salomon wore a Red Cross brasard on his arm.
Under the rules of the Geneva Convention, no medical officer can bear arms against the enemy.
The Medal of Honor recommendation was returned to Captain Love.
Denied.
No further action.
The telegram arrived at the Salomon family home in Los Angeles on July 15th, 1944.
The war department regretted to inform them that Captain Benjamin L.
Solomon had been killed in action on Saipan on July 7th.
The family was devastated.
Ben’s father had already heard stories about his son from other soldiers.
The boy who wanted to be a soldier, the dentist who became a hero, but the War Department telegram contained no details about how he died.
Captain Love did not forget about Benjamin Solomon.
The denial from General Grryer troubled him.
The evidence was overwhelming.
The action was clearly worthy of the Medal of Honor.
But the Geneva Convention argument had stopped the process.
Love filed his report in the division archives.
He documented everything.
He kept copies of all witness statements.
He preserved the photographs.
Someday, he thought, someone might reopen this case.
The war ended in August 1945.
Japan surrendered.
American forces returned home.
The 27th Infantry Division was deactivated.
Soldiers scattered across the country.
They returned to civilian life.
Many tried to forget what they had seen.
Some could not.
The veterans of Saipan carried those memories forever.
In 1951, Captain Love tried again.
He was no longer in the military.
He was a civilian historian, but he still had all his documentation from Saipan.
He had kept everything.
witness statements, photographs, maps.
He submitted a new recommendation for Captain Solomon’s Medal of Honor through the Office of the Chief of Military History.
This was the proper channel for delayed awards for cases that had been overlooked during wartime.
The recommendation was reviewed.
The evidence was examined.
The conclusion was the same.
Captain Solomon’s actions were heroic.
They met all criteria for the Medal of Honor.
But there was a problem, a new problem.
The time limit for submitting World War II awards had expired.
Congress had established a deadline.
All Medal of Honor recommendations had to be submitted within a certain period after the war ended.
That deadline had passed.
The recommendation was returned to Captain Love.
No action taken.
Official reason, time limit expired.
Love was told that nothing more could be done.
The case was closed.
He filed his documentation again, kept his copies, waited.
Years passed.
The Korean War came and went.
The Vietnam War began.
A new generation of soldiers fought.
New heroes emerged.
New medals were awarded.
Benjamin Solomon remained forgotten.
His family knew he had died heroically, but they had no official recognition.
No medal, no ceremony, just a telegram from 1944.
In 1968, Dr.
John I.
Engel became dean of the University of Southern California School of Dentistry, the same school where Benjamin Solomon had graduated in 1937.
Engel was friends with Solomon’s father.
The old man told him about his son, the dentist who wanted to be a soldier, the hero of Saipan, the Medal of Honor that was denied.
Leel was outraged.
He decided to do something about it.
Leel contacted Major General Robert B.
Shira.
Shira was the chief of the Army Dental Corps in 1968.
Engel explained the situation, showed him the documentation he had obtained, asked him to reopen the case.
Shira agreed.
This was an injustice that needed to be corrected.
He began the process of reconstructing the award recommendation.
The problem was that most records had been lost.
The original 1944 recommendation could not be located.
The 1951 submission had disappeared.
None of the paperwork existed in official files anymore.
Shira had to start from scratch.
He contacted Captain Love.
Love still had his copies.
He had kept them for 24 years.
Everything was still there.
In 1969, Lieutenant General Hal B.
Jennings took over as surgeon general of the United States Army.
He reviewed the Solomon case.
He read all the evidence.
He consulted with legal experts about the Geneva Convention issue.
The interpretation had changed since 1944.
Modern understanding of international law allowed medical personnel to use weapons in self-defense and in defense of their patients.
Solomon had been protecting wounded soldiers.
That was defensive action, not offensive.
Jennings submitted a new Medal of Honor recommendation in 1969.
It went through proper channels up the chain of command.
Each level reviewed and approved.
The recommendation reached the Secretary of the Army in 1970.
Stanley R.
Resour was Secretary of the Army.
He read the recommendation.
He approved it.
He forwarded it to the Secretary of Defense with his endorsement.
The recommendation sat on the desk of the Secretary of Defense.
Weeks passed.
Months passed.
Then it came back.
No action taken.
No explanation given.
Just returned without approval.
The case was dead again.
Reer tried to find out why.
He made inquiries.
He pushed for answers.
The response was vague.
policy considerations, timing issues, nothing specific.
The recommendation was filed away again.
The Solomon family was told that the case had been reviewed, that it had been denied.
Again, no medal would be awarded.
The family accepted this.
What else could they do? Benjamin Solomon had died 26 years earlier.
The war was ancient history now.
Vietnam was the current war.
Nobody cared about Saipan anymore.
But one person still cared.
Dr.
Robert West joined the University of Southern California School of Dentistry faculty in 1992.
He learned about Benjamin Solomon, the school’s most famous graduate, the hero who was never recognized.
West read everything he could find.
He studied the case.
He became convinced that this was an injustice.
In 1998, West decided to try one more time.
Dr.
Robert West was not a military historian.
He was a dentist, a professor, but he understood bureaucracy.
He understood how to build a case.
He knew that previous attempts had failed because they went through military channels.
The military had rejected Salomon five times already.
West needed a different approach.
He needed political pressure.
West contacted Congressman Brad Sherman.
Sherman represented California’s 27th congressional district.
His district included the University of Southern California.
West explained the case to Sherman, showed him the documentation, the evidence, the witness statements, the photographs from 1944.
Sherman was convinced this was a legitimate injustice.
He agreed to help.
Sherman had power that previous advocates did not.
He was a member of Congress.
He could make inquiries that would be taken seriously.
He could push departments that had ignored earlier requests.
He began working the case through congressional channels, asking questions, demanding reviews, making it clear that this issue would not go away.
West also contacted Major General Patrick D.
Scully.
Scully had become the new chief of the Army Dental Corps.
He was a strong advocate for dental officers.
He believed that medical personnel who fought to save lives deserved recognition.
Scully reviewed the Salomon case personally.
He read all the documentation.
He consulted with legal experts about the Geneva Convention issues.
The legal interpretation was now clear.
Salomon’s actions were defensive.
Protecting patience was within the rules.
Scully threw his full support behind the recommendation.
He used his position to push the case through army channels.
He coordinated with Sherman’s congressional efforts.
Together, they created pressure from two directions, military and political.
The combination was effective.
The recommendation went to the Department of the Army, then to the Department of Defense, then to the White House.
Each level required review, legal analysis, historical verification.
The process took months.
West and Sherman pushed at every delay.
They would not let the case die again.
In 2001, the recommendation reached the desk of President George W.
Bush.
The president reviewed the case personally.
He read Captain Solomon’s story.
He examined the evidence.
98 enemy soldiers killed, 76 wounds died protecting his patients.
The president made his decision.
The Medal of Honor would be awarded.
On May 1st, 2002, a ceremony was held at the White House.
Dr.
Robert West attended.
He would accept the medal on behalf of the University of Southern California School of Dentistry.
Captain Solomon had no surviving immediate family.
His parents had died years earlier.
The medal would go to his school to be displayed, to be remembered.
President Bush spoke at the ceremony.
He described Captain Solomon’s actions on Saipan, the bonsai charge, the hand-to-hand combat, the machine gun, the 98 enemy soldiers, the 76 wounds.
He explained why the medal had been delayed, the Geneva Convention interpretation, the bureaucratic obstacles, the five previous denials.
The president was clear.
This delay was wrong.
Captain Solomon had earned this medal in 1944.
He should have received it in 1944.
The fact that it took 58 years to correct this injustice was shameful.
But today, the injustice would be corrected.
Today, Captain Benjamin L.
Solomon would receive the recognition he deserved.
President Bush presented the Medal of Honor to Dr.
West.
The citation was read aloud.
The official description of Captain Solomon’s actions.
The medical tent under attack, the wounded soldiers evacuated, the machine gun position, the 98 enemy killed, the 76 wounds suffered, the ultimate sacrifice.
West accepted the medal.
He spoke briefly.
He described Benjamin Solomon as a man who wanted to serve his country, who was forced to be a dentist when he wanted to be a soldier, who became both in the end, a healer who killed to save lives, a dentist who died like a warrior.
Wes said the medal would be displayed at the USC School of Dentistry, where students could see it, where they could learn about the man who graduated from their school, who gave everything for his patients.
The ceremony ended.
The medal was placed in a case.
It would be transported to Los Angeles to the University of Southern California to the dental school where it remains today, a small blue ribbon with white stars.
The Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration, earned in 1944, awarded in 2002, 58 years late.
Captain Benjamin L.
Solomon became one of only three dental officers to receive the Medal of Honor in American military history.
He is the only one to receive it for direct combat action, the only dentist who earned it with a machine gun, the only medical officer whose Medal of Honor was delayed for more than half a century.
The story of his death became required reading at the Army Medical Department.
His actions are studied in military ethics courses.
The question is always the same.
Did Solomon violate the Geneva Convention or did he uphold the highest traditions of military medicine? The debate continues, but the medal has been awarded.
The question is answered.
Benjamin Solomon died on July 7th, 1944.
He was 29 years old.
He saved 30 wounded soldiers that morning.
He killed 98 enemy soldiers.
He took 76 bullets and bayonet wounds.
He never left his machine gun.
58 years later, his country finally said, “Thank you.
” The medal sits in a display case at the University of Southern California School of Dentistry.
Students walk past it every day.
Most stopped to read the plaque.
Captain Benjamin L.
Solomon, Medal of Honor, Battle of Saipan, July 7th, 1944.
Some students do not understand at first.
A dentist with a medal of honor.
Then they read the details.
98 enemy killed, 76 wounds.
They understand.
The Army Medical Department uses Solomon’s story in training.
Medical officers study his case.
The question is always presented.
What would you do? Your aid station is being overrun.
Your patients cannot evacuate on their own.
Enemy soldiers are bayonetting wounded men.
Do you run or do you fight? There is no correct answer, only the answer Solomon gave.
Military ethicists debate his case.
Some argue he violated the Geneva Convention.
Medical personnel are non-combatants.
They must not bear arms.
Others argue he upheld a higher duty, the duty to protect patients, the duty to save lives, even if it meant taking lives.
The debate will never be resolved.
Both sides have valid arguments, but the men who survived because of Solomon never debated.
They knew what he did.
He gave them time to escape.
He held the position so they could live.
30 wounded soldiers walked away from that aid station.
Most survived the war.
They went home.
They had families, children, grandchildren.
All because one dentist picked up a machine gun.
The mathematics are simple.
Solomon saved 30 lives.
He took 98.
The arithmetic of war.
The calculus of sacrifice.
One man decided that his life was worth less than 30 others.
He made that decision in seconds.
He lived that decision for hours.
He died for that decision.
Benjamin Solomon wanted to be a soldier.
The army made him a dentist.
On Saipan, he became both.
He healed men with his hands in the morning.
He killed the enemy with a machine gun by afternoon.
He died doing what he always wanted to do, fighting for his country, protecting his men, being a soldier.
His story asks uncomfortable questions.
When does a healer become a warrior? When does medicine become warfare? When does saving American lives justify everything else? These questions have no easy answers.
But they are worth asking because men like Salomon force us to think about duty, about sacrifice, about the cost of protecting those who cannot protect themselves.
The battle of Saipan lasted 25 days.
Over 3,000 Americans gave their lives.
The island became a launching point for the air campaign that would end the war.
B-29 bombers flew from Saipan’s runways to strike the Japanese homeland.
Every mission that took off from that airfield was made possible by the men who bled for that ground.
Benjamin Solomon was one of thousands who died taking Saipan.
But his death was different.
Not because he killed more enemy soldiers than anyone else that day.
Not because he suffered more wounds, but because he chose to stay.
He could have retreated with his patience.
He could have abandoned the position.
He could have saved himself.
He chose not to.
That choice defines heroism.
Not the killing, not the suffering, the choice, the decision to put others first.
To value their lives above your own.
To die so they can live.
That is what the Medal of Honor recognizes.
Not courage, not skill, sacrifice.
Saipan is quiet now.
The battlefield is overgrown.
Nature has reclaimed the ground where Americans fought and died.
A marker stands near where Salomon’s aid station was located, near where he made his last stand.
Name, rank, date, medal of honor.
Nothing more is needed.
The machine gun is gone, salvaged decades ago.
The ground has healed.
The scars remain only in memory.
But the story survives, passed down through generations, from veterans to children, from teachers to students, from historians to viewers like you.
The dentist who became a soldier, the healer who became a warrior, the man who died so 30 Americans could live.
He got his wish.
He died a soldier.
Not a dentist, a soldier.
He earned his medal.
58 years late, but earned.
Captain Benjamin L.
Salomon, 29 years old, the only dentist in American history to receive the Medal of Honor for direct combat.
98 enemy soldiers in front of his gun, 76 wounds in his body, and 30 Americans alive because he refused to leave.
That is the story, and now you know it.
But most people do not.
Most people have never heard the name Ben Solomon.
That is where you come in.
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We dig through archives, through official records, through Medal of Honor citations to find men like Solomon.
Men who were forgotten, men who were denied, men whose stories sat in filing cabinets for decades while the world moved on.
We pull them out.
We tell their stories every week.
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Thank you for watching.
Thank you for staying until the end.
And thank you for making sure that Captain Ben Solomon finally gets what the United States Army denied him for 58 years.
The official casualty reports from Saipan recorded Captain Benjamin L.
Salomon as killed in action on July 7th, 1944.
The report did not capture the scale of what had happened around his machine gun position.
Paperwork rarely does.
Military forms have small boxes for extraordinary things.
They reduce chaos into categories, heroism into typed lines, death into administrative language.
Somewhere in an army archive, his sacrifice became a serial number, a date, a location, a line on a morning report.
But the men who walked through that battlefield afterward never forgot what they saw.
Years later, veterans of the 105th Infantry Regiment still spoke about the position in almost religious terms.
They described the field of bodies around the Browning machine gun, the heat coming off the barrel hours after the battle ended, the smell of burned powder mixed with blood and tropical rot.
One infantryman who reached the site later that afternoon said the ground looked as though an artillery shell had exploded in flesh.
Another said he had never seen so many dead concentrated around a single weapon operated by one man.
Veterans exaggerated sometimes.
War stories grow over time.
But in Solomon’s case, the official investigation confirmed the horror almost exactly as the witnesses described it.
Captain Edmund Love’s photographs from the battlefield survived in division archives for decades.
Black-and-white images.
Grainy, sun-bleached, imperfect.
Yet even in those damaged photographs, the violence around Solomon’s position is unmistakable.
Japanese bodies lie layered over each other in tangled heaps.
The machine gun sits at the center like the axle of a wheel.
Every corpse points toward it.
Every dead man had been moving in the same direction when he died.
Love himself struggled afterward with the emotional weight of documenting the battlefield.
Historians are supposed to observe.
Record.
Measure.
Maintain distance.
But Saipan made distance impossible.
In later correspondence, Love admitted that Solomon’s position affected him differently than any other battlefield scene he documented during the war.
He wrote that there was something terrifying about evidence of a single human being deciding to stand alone against impossible odds and then actually succeeding long enough to matter.
That last part stayed with him.
Long enough to matter.
Because Solomon did not stop the banzai charge by himself.
No one man could have.
The Japanese assault involved thousands of soldiers across miles of battlefield.
American artillery, marine reinforcements, and reorganized infantry lines eventually halted the attack.
But Solomon held one critical piece of ground at one critical moment, and because he held it, wounded men escaped.
Because they escaped, they survived.
Because they survived, the line had time to reform.
War often turns on moments smaller than history books admit.
A bridge held for ten minutes longer than expected.
A radio transmission completed before artillery lands.
A medic who refuses to retreat.
The difference between catastrophe and survival is frequently measured in minutes and yards rather than grand strategy.
The survivors from Solomon’s aid station understood this better than anyone.
Several of those wounded soldiers later testified that Japanese troops were already entering the medical tent when Solomon ordered the evacuation.
Had he delayed even another minute, the wounded men likely would have been trapped inside.
Many could barely walk.
Some were unconscious.
Others were bleeding heavily from abdominal and chest wounds.
They moved slowly, stumbling through smoke and darkness toward the rear while Solomon remained behind them buying time with rifle fire and eventually with the Browning machine gun.
One survivor later said, “We heard that gun behind us the whole way back.
” Another described the sound as steady, controlled, disciplined.
Not panic firing.
Not desperation.
A trained machine gunner working methodically.
That detail matters because Solomon had once been exactly that.
Before the Army turned him into a dental officer, he had trained extensively with infantry weapons.
The men around him knew it.
Even years later, former members of the 105th remembered him crawling through mud during field exercises alongside enlisted riflemen, demonstrating machine gun placement and overlapping fields of fire with the confidence of a combat NCO rather than a medical officer.
He understood infantry tactics instinctively.
He understood how to delay an attack, how to channel enemy movement, how to maximize kill zones.
On Saipan, every one of those skills came back to him.
The Browning M1917A1 itself was an old weapon by World War II standards, heavy and cumbersome compared to newer air-cooled guns.
Water cooled.
Nearly 50 pounds without ammunition.
Designed for sustained defensive fire.
Most soldiers hated moving it because it required an entire crew.
Gunner, assistant gunner, ammunition bearers.
Solomon operated it alone while wounded.
Military analysts later reconstructed the likely mechanics of his defense based on shell casing patterns, blood trails, and body locations.
The evidence suggested that Solomon shifted positions repeatedly to prevent Japanese attackers from flanking him.
He dragged the gun while bleeding from multiple wounds, reestablished firing arcs, and resumed shooting each time enemy soldiers threatened to overrun the position.
The fact that he repositioned the weapon at all stunned investigators.
Most mortally wounded soldiers lose coordination quickly due to blood loss and shock.
Solomon continued functioning for hours.
Doctors later reviewing the case concluded that adrenaline alone could not explain it.
Training, discipline, and what one physician described as “extreme task fixation” kept him alive beyond what should have been physiologically possible.
In simple terms, he refused to stop because stopping meant the wounded behind him would die.
The Japanese soldiers attacking that morning likely had no idea they were fighting a dentist.
Many of them were already dying themselves.
The banzai charge on July 7th was not a conventional military operation.
It was a mass suicide assault ordered by Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito after Japan’s defeat on Saipan became unavoidable.
Wounded men unable to walk properly joined the charge.
Soldiers without ammunition carried spears or sharpened sticks.
Officers led attacks with drawn swords.
Some civilians participated because Imperial propaganda had convinced them Americans would torture or murder them if captured.
The attack became one of the most violent human waves of the Pacific War.
American soldiers who survived described the sound first.
Screaming.
Thousands of voices emerging from darkness before dawn.
Then came the silhouettes, dense formations moving forward through artillery fire without slowing down.
Men shot multiple times continued advancing.
Some Japanese soldiers deliberately threw themselves onto American machine guns to silence them with their bodies so others behind could continue forward.
Against that kind of attack, individual courage mattered enormously because fear spread quickly in close combat.
Once defensive lines broke, panic followed.
Units dissolved.
Command structures collapsed.
Saipan on July 7th became exactly that kind of battlefield.
Fragmented groups fighting isolated actions with little coordination.
Officers dead.
Radio lines cut.
Men defending foxholes independently.
Solomon’s stand occurred inside that collapse.
Which makes his decision even more remarkable.
He was not obligated to remain.
As a medical officer, he could have retreated with the wounded.
Nobody would have questioned it.
Nobody would have called it cowardice.
He had already done his duty by treating casualties under fire.
Instead, he voluntarily moved toward the heaviest fighting.
That choice haunted some survivors afterward.
Several men rescued from the aid station later expressed guilt that Solomon died while they lived.
One former infantryman reportedly avoided discussing Saipan for decades because he believed he owed his life to a man he barely knew and could never repay.
Another survivor attended memorial events years later and stood silently beside Solomon’s photograph without speaking to reporters or family members.
Trauma expresses itself differently in every veteran.
Sometimes through stories.
Sometimes through silence.
The Army itself struggled with Solomon’s legacy because his actions exposed an uncomfortable contradiction inside military medicine.
Armies want medics and doctors protected under international law.
The Geneva Convention exists partly because wounded soldiers need treatment regardless of nationality.
Medical neutrality matters.
But battlefields do not always respect neat legal categories.
When enemy troops are bayoneting wounded men inside a medical tent, abstract legal principles collide with immediate human reality.
That collision sat at the center of every argument surrounding Solomon’s Medal of Honor recommendation.
The officers who denied the award in 1944 were not necessarily malicious men.
Many genuinely believed the Geneva Convention prohibited recognition for combat actions by medical personnel.
They feared establishing a precedent encouraging doctors and medics to become combatants.
From a bureaucratic perspective, the decision had internal logic.
From the perspective of the wounded soldiers Solomon saved, it felt insane.
The legal interpretation eventually changed because military scholars revisited what the Geneva Convention actually allowed.
Medical personnel are permitted to defend themselves and their patients.
Solomon had not abandoned medicine to become an infantryman.
He had fought precisely because he was protecting wounded men under his care.
That distinction became crucial decades later when advocates reopened the case.
By then, however, almost everyone directly involved was old or dead.
Captain Love spent years preserving evidence because he feared the story would vanish entirely.
Paper degrades.
Witnesses die.
Memories fade.
He understood that history survives only if someone deliberately protects it.
His files on Solomon became almost obsessive in their detail.
Handwritten notes.
Interview transcripts.
Position diagrams.
Ammunition estimates.
Copies of official denials.
Without Love, the Medal of Honor probably never would have happened.
The same is true of Dr.
Robert West decades later.
West approached the case like a historian assembling a criminal investigation.
He tracked surviving documents across archives, interviewed military officials, coordinated political support, and pushed relentlessly through layers of institutional resistance.
By the late 1990s, the Army itself had changed enough culturally that Solomon’s story resonated differently.
Combat medics in Korea and Vietnam had carried weapons routinely.
The old rigid distinction between healer and fighter no longer reflected battlefield reality.
The world had finally caught up to what Solomon did in 1944.
When President George W.
Bush approved the Medal of Honor in 2001, the decision carried symbolic weight beyond one man’s actions.
It represented the military formally acknowledging that protecting human life sometimes requires terrible violence.
That medicine and warfare are not always morally separate in combat.
That a healer can become a warrior without ceasing to be a healer.
At the White House ceremony in 2002, many attendees reportedly cried during the reading of the citation.
Some were military officers.
Others were dentists from USC.
Several had never served in combat but were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of Solomon’s sacrifice.
Dr.
Robert West later admitted he felt an odd sadness during the ceremony despite the victory.
The medal was finally awarded, but the man who earned it had been dead for nearly six decades.
His parents never saw the recognition.
Most of the men he saved were already gone.
Justice delayed had still been delayed.
Yet perhaps that delay also explains why the story endures.
Because Solomon’s case became more than a battlefield anecdote.
It became a fight against forgetting itself.
Every generation risks losing memory of the people who carried it through catastrophe.
Wars eventually become documentaries, then textbooks, then trivia.
Names disappear first.
Then faces.
Then meaning.
Heroism flattens into statistics.
Ben Solomon resisted that process somehow.
Maybe because the image is impossible to forget once you hear it clearly.
A dentist from Los Angeles.
A machine gun surrounded by bodies.
A man bleeding from dozens of wounds still pulling the trigger because wounded soldiers behind him needed more time.
The image stays.
Military instructors still use Solomon’s story today because it forces students to confront the hardest ethical questions without offering comfortable answers.
Duty versus survival.
Law versus morality.
Violence committed in defense of compassion.
The contradiction at the center of war itself.
There are no clean resolutions in those discussions.
Some medical ethicists remain uncomfortable celebrating combat actions by physicians, even in extreme circumstances.
Others argue Solomon represents the purest form of medical duty imaginable because he sacrificed himself protecting patients who could not escape alone.
Both interpretations exist simultaneously.
Neither fully cancels the other.
But the battlefield itself was less ambiguous.
Thirty wounded Americans escaped the aid station alive.
That fact remained constant through every debate, every denied recommendation, every legal review, every bureaucratic delay.
Men lived because Solomon stayed behind the gun.
The Army eventually engraved his name into official memory, but memory had already existed long before the medal arrived.
It lived inside the survivors who heard the machine gun behind them while stumbling toward safety through smoke and darkness.
It lived inside Captain Love preserving photographs for decades because he refused to let the story disappear.
It lived inside old veterans who still spoke about the battlefield with stunned disbelief years later.
And now it lives in history.
Saipan today is quiet enough that visitors sometimes struggle to imagine the violence that occurred there.
Tropical wind moves through grass where artillery once exploded.
Tourists stand on cliffs overlooking blue Pacific water without realizing how many men died nearby.
Time softens landscapes first.
Human beings afterward.
But some places hold echoes stubbornly.
Veterans returning to Saipan decades later occasionally described feeling an almost physical heaviness near former battle sites.
Rationally, they knew the island had changed.
Emotionally, the past remained close beneath the surface.
One former soldier from the 27th Infantry reportedly stood near Solomon’s last position in silence for several minutes before finally saying, “He bought us this ground.
”
Not conquered.
Bought.
As though land itself required payment in blood.
Perhaps that is the real reason Solomon’s story matters.
Not because he killed 98 enemy soldiers or suffered 76 wounds or became the only dentist awarded the Medal of Honor for direct combat.
Those details are staggering, but numbers alone do not create meaning.
The meaning comes from the decision.
Stay or leave.
Fight or survive.
One man looked at wounded soldiers who could not protect themselves and decided their lives mattered more than his own.
Everything that followed came from that single choice.
Most people never face a moment demanding that level of sacrifice.
History is fortunate about that.
But when such moments do arrive, civilization depends entirely on whether someone chooses as Solomon chose.
That is why the story survived every denial and every decade of neglect.
Because somewhere deep beneath the uniforms and medals and legal arguments, people recognized something eternal in it.
A human being standing between helpless lives and approaching death and refusing to move.
The machine gun eventually fell silent on Saipan.
The battlefield cooled.
The war moved on toward Iwo Jima and Okinawa and finally Japan itself.
But for one terrible morning in July 1944, Captain Benjamin L.
Solomon held the line alone long enough for others to live.
And in the end, after 58 years of paperwork and arguments and forgotten files reopened by stubborn people who refused to let him disappear, his country finally admitted what the battlefield had known all along.
The dentist had died a soldier.
And the soldier had earned the medal.
