Part 2: The Art of the Steal & The Silent War
The ramp of the Higgins boat didn’t just lower; it slammed into the wet sand like a judge’s gavel sentencing us to hell.
The ocean behind us was a churning soup of diesel, blood, and salt. Ahead of us, Saipan was burning. The Japanese artillery wasn’t just “active”; it was a rhythmic, thundering devastation that shook the fillings in your teeth. But as I surged forward into the knee-deep surf, water logging my boots, I wasn’t looking at the tree line where 30,000 enemy soldiers were waiting . I was looking at the men to my left and right.
Regular Marines—good kids from Iowa farms and New York delis—were hesitating. It’s natural. The human brain isn’t wired to run toward exploding ordnance. But my guys? My “40 Thieves”? They didn’t hesitate. They moved with the frantic, aggressive energy of a prison riot. They scattered, not out of fear, but out of instinct. They were spreading out, finding cover, their eyes already scanning for the angles, the shadows, the weak points.
I watched Miller, a kid who had been arrested for grand larceny back in the States, vault over a piece of driftwood and bring his M1903 Springfield to his shoulder in one fluid motion. He didn’t look like a soldier following a drill manual. He looked like a predator.
That was exactly what I had banked on. That was exactly what Colonel Rizley had asked for when he told me he needed men who “fought dirty” .
As we pushed up that beach, leaving the chaos of the landing zone for the suffocating humidity of the jungle edge, my mind flashed back to how this strange brotherhood began. It wasn’t in a recruitment office with posters of Uncle Sam. It was in the brig.
Two Months Earlier: The Brig at Camp Tarawa
“You’re looking for what, Lieutenant?” the MP sergeant had asked me, his eyebrows practically climbing into his hairline.
“I’m looking for the winners,” I said, lighting a cigarette and leaning against the chain-link fence of the stockade.
“Sir, these men are in here for brawling, theft, insubordination… they’re dirtbags,” the sergeant spat.
“Exactly,” I replied.
I had a theory, one that didn’t sit well with the brass but made perfect sense to anyone who had actually been in a scrap. In the Marine Corps, when two guys got into a fight at a bar or in the barracks, the MPs would break it up. The loser—the guy with the broken nose or the concussed head—usually got sent to the infirmary to get patched up. The winner—the guy standing over him, knuckles bloody but still standing—went to the brig .
The Corps saw a disciplinary problem. I saw a survivor.
I walked down the row of cells. The air smelled of sweat, mildew, and unwashed bodies. These weren’t the polished poster boys of the recruitment reels. These were the castoffs. The guys who didn’t fit.
I stopped at a cell holding a man named Kowalski. He was sitting on his bunk, staring at his hands. He was massive, with a neck like a tree stump. His record said he had been a professional boxer before the war . He was in here for nearly killing a guy in a dispute over a card game.
“Kowalski,” I said.
He looked up, eyes dead and flat. “What do you want, sir?”
“I’m putting together a platoon,” I said. “Scout Snipers. We operate alone. Behind enemy lines. No support. High casualty rate.”
He laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “And you want me? I’m a criminal, Lieutenant. That’s what the Captain said.”
“The Captain wants men who march in a straight line,” I told him. “I want men who can knock a man out cold with one punch and not feel bad about it in the morning. I read your file. You don’t quit.”
I moved to the next cell. A guy named Russo. He was smaller, wiry, with eyes that darted around the room like a trapped rat. Before the Corps, he had been a bodyguard for a Chicago gangster . He knew how to read a room, how to spot a threat before it happened. He was in for theft and “misappropriation of government property.”
“Russo,” I said. “You tired of this cage?”
“Depends on the alternative, Lieutenant,” he quipped, leaning against the bars.
“Alternative is Saipan,” I said. “The Marine Corps is giving you a choice. You can rot in this military prison, or you can choose combat duty. Real combat duty.” .
He looked at me, really looked at me, gauging if I was serious. “What’s the catch?”
“The catch is that the planners say 73% of us won’t come back,” I said, giving it to him straight . “But if we do, we come back heroes. Or at least, free men.”
One by one, I made the pitch. I pulled 42 men from the punishment details across the Second Marine Division . The youngest was a 17-year-old kid who had lied about his age to join up and then got busted for stealing food because the rations weren’t enough . The oldest was 34, a man who had seen too much of the hard side of life during the Great Depression .
They were a motley crew. Thieves, brawlers, potential felons. But they all had one thing in common: they chose the fire over the frying pan. They chose combat .
Training: The School of Hard Knocks
Camp Tarawa was where I turned a gang of convicts into a platoon. But it wasn’t easy. The first thing we realized was that the Marine Corps—God love it—was the poor cousin of the American military machine in 1944 .
While the Army units down the road were driving brand new jeeps and eating fresh rations, we were issued surplus weapons from World War I . We had rusty rifles, inadequate ammunition, and uniforms that had seen better days. The Corps expected us to fight the Empire of Japan with hand-me-downs.
“This is garbage,” Russo said one afternoon, holding up a canteen that leaked. “How are we supposed to fight if we starve to death first?”
I looked at him. I looked at the 40 men standing around in the dust, angry and under-equipped. I realized this was the first test.
“You guys are criminals, right?” I asked loud enough for the whole platoon to hear. “That’s what they call you. Thieves. Troublemakers.”
They stared at me, waiting for the lecture.
“Well,” I smiled, “if the shoe fits… wear it. The Army supply depot is five miles down the road. I hear they have fresh steaks. I hear they have new boots. I hear they have jeeps.”
The look that passed between them was electric. It was the moment they stopped being prisoners and started being my men.
That night, the training didn’t focus on marching. It focused on infiltration. But not against the Japanese—not yet. Against the US Army.
My men excelled at theft . It was in their blood. They moved like ghosts. They raided the Army supply depots for food, filling their packs with rations that were meant for officers . They hit the Navy warehouses for equipment, securing webbing, knives, and compasses .
But the crowning achievement came a week later. I woke up one morning to find three brand new Army jeeps parked behind our barracks, hastily painted with Marine Corps markings that looked suspiciously wet.
“Where did those come from?” I asked Kowalski, who was polishing the hood of one with a rag.
“Found ’em, sir,” he said, not breaking eye contact. “They looked lost.” .
The other Marines in the Sixth Regiment started noticing. They saw us eating better, driving better, and looking sharper than the rest of the division. They nicknamed us “The 40 Thieves” . It wasn’t an insult. In the starvation economy of the Pacific war, it was a badge of honor. The name stuck .
But the stealing was just a means to an end. The real work was grim.
We weren’t training to storm beaches in straight lines. We were training to hunt. We spent weeks in the jungle practicing skills the regular Marine Corps manuals didn’t even mention.
“Silence is your god now,” I told them during a night exercise. “If you make a sound, you die. If you disturb a branch, you die.”
We practiced silent killing techniques with knives and bare hands . I taught them the anatomy of the human neck—how to approach a sentry from behind, lock the arm, and twist. The snap needed to be instantaneous. It was brutal, intimate violence, far removed from the impersonal nature of artillery.
We spent hours learning how to move through jungle terrain without disturbing the vegetation . I would have them walk ten yards, and if I saw a fern sway or a twig snap, they ran laps until they puked. We learned to become part of the landscape.
We studied the enemy. We didn’t just look at maps; we learned to read Japanese maps and documents . We memorized their fortification patterns . We learned how they defended islands, where they liked to put their machine gun nests, how they overlapped their fields of fire .
We became experts with the tools of our trade. We fitted our M1903 Springfield rifles with 8-power Unertl scopes . We spent days at the range, learning to hit a man-sized target from 600 yards away . We drilled until we could calculate windage and elevation by feel alone.
But we also needed punch. We trained with bazookas, learning the precise angles needed to destroy tanks and blast open fortified concrete bunkers . We learned how to call in naval gunfire and artillery strikes, bringing the wrath of the fleet down on a specific grid coordinate .
By June 1944, the “40 Thieves” were no longer a ragtag group of convicts. They were a razor-sharp instrument of war. They knew how to fight, how to hide, and most importantly, how to kill without making a noise .
Present Day: Saipan, Moving Inland
The memory of the stolen jeeps and the Camp Tarawa sun faded as the reality of Saipan crashed back in.
We had pushed off the beach, moving ahead of the main force. The plan was clear: land with the first wave, push inland, locate Japanese positions, and radio coordinates back to the artillery and naval units . Then, we were to disappear into the jungle and continue mapping enemy fortifications for days at a time .
The jungle canopy closed over us, dimming the brutal midday sun. The noise of the beach assault was behind us now, a dull roar. Here, in the green twilight, it was quiet. Too quiet.
This was the “Scout” part of our job. We were the eyes.
I signaled for a halt. Russo crept up beside me, his movement silent. He pointed ahead, through a thicket of bamboo.
About 150 yards up a slight rise, there was a disturbance in the foliage. To the untrained eye, it was nothing. But we had studied aerial photographs of Saipan until our eyes bled . We knew the Japanese fortification patterns. That slight mound of earth wasn’t natural. It was a pillbox, camouflaged with vegetation, overlooking the main trail the regular Marines would be using in an hour.
If we didn’t neutralize it, a company of Marines would walk right into a slaughter.
“What do you think, boss?” Russo whispered.
“It’s a heavy machine gun nest,” I whispered back. ” flanking positions likely ten yards to the left and right.”
This was the test. We were alone. No backup. 40 men against an island of 30,000 .
I looked at the men. They were wet, sand-covered, and adrenaline-pumped. But they weren’t reckless. They were calculating.
“Kowalski, take the bazooka team to the left flank,” I ordered softly. “Stay low. Do not engage until I give the signal. Miller, take your section right. I want snipers watching the apertures of that pillbox. If anything moves, put a round in it.”
They moved out, melting into the jungle. It was beautiful in a terrifying way. These men, who society had deemed “troublemakers” and “criminals,” were executing a complex flanking maneuver with a precision that West Point cadets would envy.
I waited, checking my watch. The humidity was oppressive, sweat stinging my eyes. A bird called out, a harsh screech in the silence.
We were “The 40 Thieves.” We had stolen food, we had stolen jeeps, and we had stolen our freedom from the brig. Now, we were about to steal the enemy’s advantage.
We had trained for six months for this moment . The casualties were predicted to be 73% . As I watched Kowalski raise the bazooka tube, lining up the shot on the Japanese bunker, I prayed that the statisticians were wrong.
But deep down, I knew the numbers didn’t lie. We were playing with house money. We were dead men walking, given a second chance to do something that mattered.
The bazooka fired—a “whoosh” followed by a thunderous crack as the rocket slammed into the concrete pillbox.
The silent war was over. The loud one had just begun.
“Open fire!” I screamed, and the jungle exploded.
The firefight was brief but violent. The Japanese defenders, stunned by the sudden explosion, tried to pivot their heavy Nambu machine gun, but my snipers were already dialed in. Two shots rang out from the right flank—Miller and his spotter. The gunners in the pillbox slumped forward.
“Move up! Move up!”
We swept through the position. It was a textbook assault. We checked the bodies—standard procedure. But we didn’t linger. We weren’t infantry holding ground; we were ghosts. We had to map this, call it in, and vanish before the enemy reinforcements arrived.
” Lieutenant!”
It was the 17-year-old, “Kid” Evans. He was crouched by the back entrance of the bunker, holding a map case he had pulled off a Japanese officer’s body.
“Look at this,” he said, handing it to me.
I unfolded the rice-paper map. It was covered in Japanese characters, but thanks to our training, the symbols were familiar . My heart skipped a beat. This wasn’t just a local defense map. It showed a network of artillery positions further inland—massive guns that could rain devastation on the landing beaches.
“This is gold,” I muttered. “Radio operator! Get this grid back to the fleet. Tell them we have confirmed targets for the battleships.” .
As the radio operator began to whisper coordinates into the handset, calling in the thunder of the Navy guns sitting offshore, I looked around at my platoon. They were looting the bodies—taking cigarettes, coins, pistols. Old habits die hard.
“Hey!” I hissed. “Cut that out. Focus.”
Russo grinned, slipping a Japanese flag into his pocket. “Just a souvenir, boss. Payment for services rendered.”
I couldn’t help but shake my head. The Marine Corps had called them the “40 Thieves” because they stole supplies. But out here, in the green hell of Saipan, they were stealing something much more valuable: time. Every minute we stayed undetected, every map we found, every coordinate we called in, bought time for the thousands of Marines hitting the beaches behind us.
“Pack it up,” I ordered. “We’re moving. Deeper.”
“Deeper?” Kowalski asked, hefting the bazooka. “There’s 30,000 of them out there, Lieutenant.” .
“Yeah,” I said, checking the action on my carbine. “And there’s only 40 of us. Poor bastards won’t know what hit ’em.”
We slipped back into the jungle, leaving the smoking ruin of the pillbox behind us. We were pushing ahead of the main force, alone in enemy territory . The mission required us to work alone behind enemy lines for days at a time .
As the sun began to dip, casting long, twisted shadows through the palm trees, the adrenaline began to fade, replaced by the gnawing anxiety of the night. Night in the jungle belongs to the enemy. We knew that. We knew the Japanese tactics—how they liked to infiltrate lines at night, how they used stealth just as well as we did .
We found a defensive position on a ridge overlooking a valley. It was a good spot—defensible, hidden. We set up a perimeter. No fires. No talking. Just the sound of breathing and the jungle insects.
I sat with my back against a tree, listening to the distant boom of the naval guns pounding the coordinates we had sent. Every boom meant we had done our job. Every boom meant fewer Marines dying on the beach.
But as I looked at the faces of my men in the fading light—faces that were hardened by prison cells and street fights—I wondered how many of them would see the sunrise. The 73% statistic kept looping in my head .
I looked at Evans, the 17-year-old. He was cleaning his fingernails with a bayonet, looking far too young to be here.
“You scared, Kid?” I whispered.
He looked up. “No, sir. Back home in Chicago, I was scared of the cops. I was scared of being hungry. Here? I got a rifle. I got you guys. I ain’t scared.”
He was lying, but it was a good lie.
“Get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll take first watch.”
The night fell like a heavy blanket. We were 40 thieves in a kingdom of 30,000 warriors. We had broken into the Emperor’s house, and we were about to start breaking the furniture.
But as the moon rose, illuminating the jungle in silver and black, I heard a sound. Not a bird. Not the wind.
A snap.
Vegetation moving where it shouldn’t.
My grip tightened on my rifle. I tapped Russo, who was dozing next to me. He woke instantly, eyes wide, hand already on his knife.
“Company,” I mouthed.
The thieves were about to be robbed of their rest. The real test of the “survivors” was starting now.
(To be continued in Part 3…)
Part 3: Ghosts in the Jungle
The jungle didn’t just hold its breath; it seemed to strangle the very air out of the night.
The snap of the twig I’d heard wasn’t an animal. Animals in the Pacific theater had learned long ago to run from the smell of cordite and unwashed men. This was a boot. A split-toed, rubber-soled tabi boot pressing down on a dry branch.
I lay frozen in the dirt, my cheek pressed against the rotting leaf litter. Beside me, Russo—the man who had spent his civilian life guarding gangsters in Chicago—was a statue carved out of shadow . His hand wasn’t on his rifle. It was on the hilt of his combat knife. We had trained for this at Camp Tarawa. We knew that gunfire in the dark was a fool’s game. It gave away your position, it wasted ammo, and it woke up the whole damn island. We had trained to kill silently .
Three shapes materialized out of the gloom, barely five yards away. A Japanese patrol. They were moving well, disciplined, scanning the tree line. But they were looking for a regiment, not a ghost squad. They were looking for clanking canteens and whispered orders. They weren’t looking for forty criminals lying in the mud, waiting to spring a trap.
I signaled to Kowalski on my left. The ex-boxer nodded .
The lead Japanese soldier stepped closer, his bayonet gleaming faintly in the sliver of moonlight filtering through the canopy. He paused, tilting his head. He sensed something. The instinct of a soldier is a primal thing; the hair on the back of his neck was probably standing up, warning him that he was walking into a grave.
He opened his mouth to shout, but Russo was faster.
The movement was a blur. Russo surged up from the brush like a demon, his hand clamping over the soldier’s mouth, driving him backward into the dirt. There was no scream, just a wet, stifled gurgle as the knife did its work.
At the same instant, Kowalski launched himself at the second man. He didn’t use a knife. He used the massive, taped hands that had once pummeled men in prize rings. He caught the soldier in a headlock, a brutal leverage of forearm against windpipe. We had practiced this for hours—how to approach a sentry and break a neck without making a sound . The sickening crack that followed was louder than I wanted, but it was over in a second. The soldier went limp.
The third man, the trail guard, fumbled for his rifle. I was already moving, my own knife drawn. But “Kid” Evans, the 17-year-old thief, was closer . He tackled the man around the waist, dragging him down. They rolled in the undergrowth, a desperate, thrashing tangle of limbs. I heard a grunt, a gasp, and then silence.
Evans stood up slowly, wiping his hands on his trousers. He was shaking. Just a tremor in the hands, but I saw it. He looked down at the man he had just killed with his bare hands. This wasn’t stealing apples or brawling in a schoolyard. This was the intimate, soul-staining work of war.
“Clear,” Russo whispered, his voice sounding like gravel grinding together.
“Drag them into the bush,” I ordered, my voice barely a breath. “Cover the blood with dirt. If a patrol finds them, they’ll know we’re here. If they just disappear… it’ll scare them more.”
We were “The 40 Thieves.” We didn’t just steal supplies; we stole men’s lives, and we stole their peace of mind. We vanished the bodies and melted back into the jungle.
Day 2: The Green Hell
We moved deeper inland as the sun rose, turning the jungle into a steam bath. The heat on Saipan was a physical weight, pressing down on your shoulders, soaking your uniform in minutes.
Our mission was clear: locate Japanese positions and radio coordinates back to artillery and naval gunfire units . But to do that, we had to get close. Uncomfortably close.
We were operating miles ahead of the main Marine force now. The sounds of the invasion—the distant thud of mortars, the rattle of machine guns—were behind us. Ahead lay the unknown. The intelligence estimates said 30,000 Japanese troops were on this island . We were forty men. The math was laughable.
By noon, we reached the edge of a jagged ridgeline overlooking the central valley. This was “Tapotchau” territory—high ground.
“Hold up,” I signaled.
I brought my binoculars up. The valley below was teeming with activity. It wasn’t just a few foxholes; it was a massive logistical hub. I saw trucks moving under camouflage netting. I saw stacks of crates. I saw artillery pieces—Type 91 10cm howitzers—being wheeled into firing positions aimed back toward the landing beaches.
This was it. This was why Colonel Rizley had sent us.
“Look at that,” Miller whispered, crawling up beside me. Miller was a kleptomaniac from New Jersey. He had been in the brig for stealing a colonel’s jeep . “That’s a lot of hardware, boss.”
“That’s a kill zone,” I corrected him. “They’re setting up a barrage that’s going to tear the Second Division apart.”
We had a choice. We could call it in now, rain hell on them, and run. But I noticed something else. Near the center of the camp, there was a large tent with an antenna array that looked too sophisticated for a standard field unit. Officers were coming in and out, carrying map cases.
“Intelligence,” I said. “That’s a command post.”
We had trained to read Japanese maps and documents . If we could get our hands on what was in that tent, we wouldn’t just stop an artillery barrage; we could reveal the defensive layout for the entire southern half of the island.
But getting in there? That was suicide.
I looked at my men. They were chewing on dry rations, checking their weapons. They were criminals, yes. But they were also the most resourceful men I had ever met. They had stolen jeeps from the US Army . Surely they could steal a map from the Imperial Japanese Army.
“Russo, Kowalski, Evans… on me,” I said. “The rest of you, set up a perimeter. Set up the radio but do not—I repeat, do not—transmit until I get back. If we’re not back in two hours, call the fire mission on the artillery park and get the hell out of here.”
“You going for a walk, Lieutenant?” Kowalski cracked his knuckles.
“We’re going shopping,” I said.
The Heist
We left our heavy gear behind. We took only knives, pistols, and a few grenades. We moved down the slope, using the heavy vegetation and the noise of the Japanese trucks to mask our approach.
This is where the “thief” mindset paid off. A regular soldier looks for a fight. A thief looks for a gap. We watched the patrol patterns. We watched where the sentries looked and, more importantly, where they didn’t look.
We found a drainage ditch that ran behind the supply crates. It was filled with brackish water and swarming with mosquitoes, but it led straight into the heart of the camp. We crawled through the muck, the smell of sewage and diesel filling our noses.
When we popped up, we were twenty yards from the command tent.
The tension was so thick you could choke on it. We were surrounded by hundreds of enemy soldiers. If one man turned his head, if one dog barked, we were dead. The casualty rate of 73% suddenly felt optimistic . It felt like 100%.
“Evans,” I whispered. “You’re the fastest. I need that map case on the table. Russo and I will create a distraction if things go south. Kowalski, you watch the rear.”
Evans nodded, his eyes wide but focused. He was the “Kid,” but he moved like a shadow. He had been arrested for burglary, slipping into second-story windows . This was just another window.
We waited for a shift change. As the guards rotated, there was a ten-second window where eyes were averted.
Evans moved. He didn’t run; he flowed. He slipped under the canvas of the tent.
I counted the seconds. One. Two. Three.
My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I gripped my Colt .45 so hard my knuckles turned white.
Ten seconds.
Twenty seconds.
What was taking him so long?
Suddenly, a Japanese officer shouted from inside the tent. My stomach dropped. I raised my pistol, ready to fire, ready to die.
But then Evans came sliding out from under the canvas, clutching a leather map case to his chest. He scrambled back toward the ditch, his face pale.
“Go! Go!” he hissed as he slid into the mud beside me.
“Did they see you?”
“I don’t know, but I think I knocked over a tea cup,” he panted.
We didn’t wait to find out. We crawled back down that ditch faster than we had come up. Behind us, shouting erupted. A siren began to wail. They knew someone had been there. They knew they had been robbed.
We scrambled up the ridge, lungs burning, legs screaming. We collapsed into our perimeter just as the first truck engines started revving in the valley below. They were sending search parties.
“Did you get it?” I asked, grabbing the case.
Evans grinned, wiping mud from his face. “Lieutenant, I told you. I steal things.”
I opened the case. Inside was a large tactical map of Saipan. It was covered in red symbols. We had studied Japanese tactics and fortification patterns for months . I knew exactly what I was looking at.
It showed everything. Every machine gun nest, every mortar pit, every hidden reserve unit for five miles.
“Holy mother…” Russo breathed, looking over my shoulder.
“Radio!” I snapped. “Get me the fleet. Now!”
The Fire Mission
The radio operator, a guy named Smitty who had done time for forgery, cranked the generator. “Sunray, this is Shadow One. Sunray, this is Shadow One. Urgent traffic. Over.”
Static crackled. Then, a clear voice. “Shadow One, this is Sunray. Go ahead.”
“Sunray, we have eyes on a major concentration of enemy armor and artillery. Grid coordinates to follow. We also have captured enemy intel on main defensive lines. Request immediate fire mission. Danger close.”
“Send traffic, Shadow One.”
I read the coordinates off the stolen map, cross-referencing them with our position. “Grid 4-4-2 dash 8-9. Concentration of armor. Grid 4-4-5 dash 9-0. Artillery park. Battery of six guns.”
“Copy, Shadow One. Shot out. Wait.”
The waiting is the worst part. You know the shells are in the air. You know death is arching across the sky, whistling toward the earth. You just hope your math was right. We had learned to call in naval gunfire , but doing it in training and doing it while an angry battalion of Japanese infantry is hunting you are two different things.
“They’re coming up the slope!” Kowalski shouted from the perimeter.
I looked down. Through the trees, I could see them. Not a patrol this time. A company. Maybe two hundred men, moving fast, bayonets fixed. They knew where we were.
“Defensive positions!” I yelled. “Hold fire until you see the whites of their eyes!”
The “40 Thieves” fanned out. We had our M1903 Springfields with the 8-power Unertl scopes . We had our stolen BARs. We had our bazookas.
“Here they come!”
The jungle erupted. The Japanese charged with a terrifying ferocity, screaming “Banzai!” My men opened up. The crack of the Springfields was methodical, precise. We had learned to hit man-sized targets at 600 yards . At 100 yards, it was target practice.
I saw Japanese soldiers drop, but more kept coming. They were swarming up the hill, using the trees for cover.
“Bazooka!” I screamed.
Kowalski and his loader popped up. They leveled the tube at a cluster of rocks where a Japanese machine gun team was setting up. Whoosh-BOOM. The rocks disintegrated in a cloud of dust and shrapnel. We had trained to destroy fortified positions , and Kowalski was an artist.
But there were too many of them. Bullets were chewing up the dirt around us, snapping branches, thudding into tree trunks.
“We can’t hold them!” Russo yelled, firing his Thompson submachine gun in short, controlled bursts. “We’re gonna get overrun!”
Then, the sky tore open.
It sounded like a freight train plummeting from the clouds. The naval shells—16-inch rounds from the battleships offshore—slammed into the valley floor below us.
The ground didn’t just shake; it convulsed. The impact knocked me off my feet. A massive mushroom cloud of dirt, fire, and steel rose from the Japanese artillery park. Then another. And another.
The shockwave rolled over us, hot and violent.
“Correction!” I screamed into the radio handset, struggling to hear myself over the apocalypse unfolding below. “Drop 500! Danger Close! They are assaulting our position!”
“Shadow One, confirm Danger Close? That’s inside safety limits.”
“Confirm! Confirm! Bring the rain or we’re dead men!”
Seconds later, the smaller 5-inch guns from the destroyers joined the chorus. The shells began to walk up the slope, tearing through the Japanese assault wave. Trees were splintered into toothpicks. The jungle turned into a landscape of fire and smoke.
The Japanese attack faltered. No human being could stand up to that kind of firepower. They broke, retreating back down the hill into the inferno.
Silence returned, ringing in our ears.
I looked around. The jungle was smoking. My men were covered in dirt, some bleeding, but they were still shooting.
“Casualty report!” I called out.
“Jenkins is hit!” someone yelled. “Leg wound. Bad.”
“Patch him up. We have to move. They’ll be back, and they’ll bring mortars next time.”
The Long Walk
We moved out, carrying Jenkins on a makeshift stretcher. We couldn’t stay in one place. That was the rule of the Scout Sniper. Strike, map, disappear .
We spent the next three days behind enemy lines, playing a deadly game of cat and mouse. We were running on adrenaline and stolen rations. We slept in shifts of twenty minutes. We were constantly wet, constantly hungry, and constantly hunted.
We continued to do our job. We located two more bunker complexes. We called in three more airstrikes. We used the stolen map to guide our movements, slipping through gaps in the Japanese lines that shouldn’t have existed.
But the island was shrinking. The American invasion force was pushing south, squeezing the Japanese defenders into a tighter and tighter pocket. And we were right in the middle of that pocket.
On the fourth day, our luck ran out.
We were crossing a ravine, trying to link back up with the 6th Marine Regiment lines. We were exhausted. Eyes sunken, uniforms in tatters. We looked more like the prisoners we used to be than soldiers.
“Ambush!”
The cry came from the rear. A Japanese machine gun opened up from a hidden cave entrance on the cliff face above us.
Two of my men went down instantly.
“Cover!”
We scrambled behind boulders. The angle was bad. They had us pinned in the ravine. Bullets sparked off the rocks, driving us down.
“Kowalski! Bazooka!”
“I’m out of rockets, Lieutenant!” Kowalski yelled back, his face a mask of frustration.
We were trapped. The Japanese had the high ground. They started rolling grenades down the slope.
I looked at Russo. He looked at me. This was it. The 73%.
“We can’t stay here,” Russo said. “We get chewed up in five minutes.”
“We need to flank them,” I said. “But someone has to draw their fire.”
It’s the decision every officer dreads. The decision that wakes you up screaming forty years later. You have to ask men to die so that others can live.
But before I could give the order, the “Kid,” Evans, stood up.
He didn’t have a weapon in his hand. He had a stolen Japanese smoke canister we had picked up at the supply depot.
“I got this, boss,” he said.
“Evans, get down!”
He didn’t listen. He pulled the pin and hurled the canister up the slope. Purple smoke billowed out, blinding the machine gunner for a split second.
And then Evans ran.
He didn’t run away. He ran toward the cliff face, scrambling up the loose shale like a mountain goat. He was drawing their fire, screaming like a banshee, moving with the reckless agility of a kid who had outrun police on the rooftops of Chicago.
The Japanese gunner swung his weapon toward the crazy American charging him.
“Now!” I screamed. “Move! Move!”
While the gunner was distracted by Evans, the rest of us surged forward. Miller and I reached the cave entrance. We tossed grenades inside. The explosion was muffled, then final. The machine gun went silent.
We scrambled up to the ledge.
Evans was lying on the rocks, clutching his chest. His uniform was dark with blood.
I knelt beside him. The 17-year-old thief who had stolen the map that saved the division.
“Did… did we get ’em?” he wheezed, pink froth bubbling on his lips.
“Yeah, Kid,” I said, my voice choking. “We got ’em. You did good.”
He tried to smile. “Not bad… for a criminal… huh?”
His eyes glazed over. He was gone. .
I sat there for a moment, the sound of the war rushing back into my ears. I looked at the other men. They weren’t looking at Evans with pity. They were looking at him with reverence.
He wasn’t a criminal. He wasn’t a troublemaker. He was a Marine.
“Grab his gear,” I said, standing up. “We’re not leaving him.”
The Return
Carrying Evans’ body, we pushed the final mile.
When we finally broke through the tree line and saw the American perimeter—the beautiful, ugly sight of barbed wire and muddy foxholes—we almost wept.
A sentry shouted, “Halt! Who goes there?”
“40 Thieves!” Russo shouted back. “Don’t shoot, you morons! It’s us!”
We stumbled into the American lines. Marines from the 6th Regiment stared at us. We looked wild. Beards, filth, Japanese weapons slung over our shoulders, bandoliers of stolen ammo. We smelled like death and swamp water.
A Captain came running up. It was Captain Reynolds from headquarters. He looked at us, then at the body of Evans.
“Lieutenant Sullivan,” he said. “We thought you were all dead. You’ve been gone four days.”
“Not dead, sir,” I said, handing him the stolen map case. “Just working.”
He opened the case, saw the intel, saw the coordinates. His eyes widened. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? This… this is the key to the whole southern defense.”
“Yeah,” I said, lighting a cigarette with trembling hands. “We figured.”
“Get these men some chow,” Reynolds ordered his sergeant. “And get them to the rear. They’ve done enough.”
I looked at my platoon. There were 34 of us left standing. We had lost six men. Casualties, but not the 73% they promised . Not yet.
We sat in the mud, eating cold beans from a can, passing a canteen of water around. We didn’t talk much. We didn’t have to. We had gone into the fire as a group of convicts, outcasts, and failures. We had come out as something else.
Russo nudged me. “Hey, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah?”
“We doing this again tomorrow?”
I looked at the map Reynolds was holding, then back at the dark jungle line where thousands of enemy soldiers still waited.
“Yeah, Russo,” I said. “We’re doing it again.”
Because that’s what we did. We were the Scout Snipers. We were the 40 Thieves. And the war wasn’t over.
(To be continued in the Final Part…)
Part 4: The Survivors
The silence of the dead is heavier than the noise of the living. That’s something they don’t teach you in boot camp, and it’s certainly not something you learn in a prison cell.
After we brought “Kid” Evans’ body back to the lines, a strange lethargy settled over the platoon. We were the “40 Thieves,” the survivors of the brig, the men who had chosen combat over incarceration . We had just pulled off an intelligence coup that likely saved thousands of lives, locating the artillery park that had been hammering the beaches. But as we sat in the mud of the rearguard, cleaning our weapons and patching our wounds, we didn’t feel like heroes. We felt like men waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I sat on an ammo crate, watching Russo sharpen his knife. The blade was worn down, the steel gleaming in the harsh tropical sun. Russo had been a bodyguard for a Chicago gangster , a man paid to look intimidating. Now, he just looked tired. Deep lines were etched around his eyes, filled with the grime of Saipan.
“How many left, Lieutenant?” he asked, not looking up.
“Thirty-four,” I said. “We lost six.”
“Six,” he repeated. “That’s better than the odds they gave us.”
“The odds were 73% casualties,” I reminded him, my voice flat . “We aren’t done yet.”
We weren’t. Saipan wasn’t just a battle; it was a slaughterhouse. The Japanese defenders, entrenched in caves and tunnels, were fighting with a ferocity that defied logic. They weren’t surrendering. They were dying in place, taking as many of us with them as they could. And we—the specialized Scout Sniper platoon—were the ones who had to go in and dig them out.
The Valley of Hell
The reprieve lasted exactly twelve hours.
Colonel Rizley came to our bivouac area the next morning. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. His uniform was stained with sweat and salt.
“Sullivan,” he said, nodding to me. “Your boys get some rest?”
“Enough, Colonel,” I lied. You never get enough rest in a war zone. You just close your eyes and wait for the nightmares to start.
“Good,” Rizley said, unfolding a map on the hood of a stolen jeep—one of the ones my men had “liberated” from the Army weeks ago . “Because I have a job that only you can do.”
I looked at the map. He pointed to the northern part of the island, a rugged, mountainous terrain known as the “Valley of Hell.” It was a maze of canyons, cliffs, and jungle so dense it swallowed light.
“Intelligence reports—the ones we got thanks to your map—indicate that General Saito is consolidating his remaining forces here,” Rizley explained. “He’s planning something big. A final push. We need to know where, when, and how.”
“You want us to go back out there?” Kowalski asked, stepping up behind me. He was looming over the Colonel, a hulking presence. “We just got back.”
“I know,” Rizley said, meeting the big ex-boxer’s gaze. “But standard recon units are getting chewed up. They make too much noise. They don’t know how to move like you do. They don’t know how to… survive.”
He was right. Standard Marine training produced excellent riflemen and assault troops . But it didn’t produce ghosts. It didn’t produce men who could crawl through a swamp for three days without eating, or who could kill a sentry with a piece of wire and not blink. It didn’t produce men who thought for themselves and ignored the rules .
“We’ll do it,” I said.
The men groaned, a low rumble of dissent, but they began gathering their gear. They were thieves, brawlers, and outcasts . But they were also Marines. And strangely, in the fire of combat, they had found a sense of purpose that society had never given them.
We re-supplied. We stole extra grenades from an unguarded supply truck . We swapped our worn-out boots for new ones “borrowed” from a sleeping Army unit . We took extra bandoliers of .30-06 ammunition for our Springfields.
As we marched out, leaving the relative safety of the American lines, I looked at the faces of my platoon. The youngest was gone. The innocence was gone. What remained was a hardened core of violence.
Into the Abyss
The “Valley of Hell” lived up to its name. The heat was trapped in the canyon floor, radiating off the rocks until the air shimmered. The smell was a cocktail of rotting vegetation, sulfur, and the sweet, sickly scent of unburied bodies.
We moved in a diamond formation, spaced ten yards apart. We didn’t speak. We communicated with hand signals—a system we had perfected at Camp Tarawa. A raised fist meant freeze. A flat hand meant get down. A finger across the throat meant enemy ahead.
We were hunting for General Saito’s command post, but we were also hunting for the “Golden Kill.” That’s what Miller called it. The one piece of intel that would end the battle.
For two days, we saw nothing but shadows. We found abandoned bunkers, empty spider holes, and trails that led nowhere. It was a ghost town. But the hair on the back of my neck never settled. The jungle felt like it was watching us.
On the third afternoon, we found it.
We were perched on a limestone ridge, looking down into a box canyon. It should have been empty. Instead, it was filled with thousands of men.
“Mother of God,” Russo whispered, lowering his binoculars.
It wasn’t a defensive position. It was a staging area. Thousands of Japanese soldiers—many of them wounded, some armed only with bamboo spears bayonets tied to sticks—were gathering. They were drinking sake. They were chanting softly.
“What is this?” Kowalski asked. “A party?”
“No,” I said, a cold dread pooling in my stomach. “It’s a funeral. Theirs. And ours.”
This was the preparation for a Gyokusai—a Banzai charge. The honorable death. They weren’t planning to hold the line. They were planning to rush the American lines in a human wave, overwhelming us with sheer numbers and ferocity.
I did a quick headcount through the scope of my Springfield. There had to be 3,000, maybe 4,000 men down there. And they were heading straight for the 105th Infantry Regiment, which was digging in two miles to our south.
“We have to warn them,” I said. “Radio.”
Smitty, our radioman—the forger—scrambled to set up the set. He cranked the generator, sweat dripping from his nose.
“Sunray, this is Shadow One. Urgent. Over.”
Static.
“Sunray, do you copy?”
Nothing but the hiss of the jungle.
“Terrain masking,” Smitty cursed, kicking the dirt. “The canyon walls are blocking the signal. We can’t reach the fleet. We can’t reach the regiment.”
We were cut off. Alone behind enemy lines .
I looked at the map. The only place we could get a signal out was the peak of Mount Tapotchau, the highest point on the island. But that was a mile away, through enemy territory.
Or, we could go back. But by the time we hiked back to the American lines, the attack would have already started. The 105th would be slaughtered in their sleep.
I looked at my men. They were looking at me. They knew the math. They knew the casualty statistics .
“We can’t let them hit the 105th without a warning,” I said. “We have to delay them.”
“Delay them?” Miller laughed nervously. “Lieutenant, there’s four thousand of them. There’s thirty-four of us. We’re good, but we ain’t that good.”
“We don’t have to fight them all,” I said, my mind racing. “We just have to make them think they’re walking into a trap. We have to cause chaos. Start a panic. Buy time for Smitty to get to high ground and send the warning.”
I laid out the plan. It was insane. It was reckless. It was exactly the kind of plan you’d expect from a group of criminals who fought dirty .
“Smitty, you take Jenkins and run for the peak. Get that message out. The rest of us… we’re going to create a diversion.”
“What kind of diversion?” Russo asked.
“We’re going to steal their attack,” I said.
The 40 Thieves vs. The Empire
We split into four teams. The objective was to flank the canyon on both sides and initiate an ambush that would make the Japanese think they were surrounded by a battalion, not a platoon.
We had our 8-power Unertl scopes . We had our bazookas . And we had the darkness.
Night fell. The chanting in the canyon grew louder. It was a terrifying sound, a low drone that vibrated in your chest.
I was with Russo and Kowalski on the eastern ridge. We had a clear view of the ammo dump in the center of their formation.
“Kowalski,” I whispered. “You see that stack of crates near the trucks?”
“I see it, boss.”
“When I give the signal, I want a rocket right in the middle of it.”
“With pleasure.”
We waited. The moon was obscured by clouds. Perfect for thieves. We were in our element. We knew how to hide, how to kill without making noise . We had spent months at Camp Tarawa learning to move through jungle terrain without disturbing vegetation .
At 2200 hours, the Japanese formation began to move. A sea of humanity started flowing toward the canyon exit.
“Now,” I said.
Whoosh.
The bazooka rocket streaked through the darkness. It slammed into the ammo crates.
The explosion was blinding. A fireball erupted in the center of the Japanese column, throwing bodies into the air. The shockwave knocked the breath out of me.
“Open fire!”
We unleashed everything we had. We weren’t shooting to kill individual targets; we were shooting to create terror. We fired into the mass of men. My Springfield kicked against my shoulder, rhythmically, methodically. Reload. Fire. Reload. Fire.
On the western ridge, Miller’s team opened up with their BARs (Browning Automatic Rifles). The crossfire was devastating.
The Japanese panicked. In the confusion and the dark, they couldn’t see that it was just a handful of men. They thought they had walked into a massive American ambush. They turned their weapons on the ridges, firing blindly into the trees.
“Move!” I yelled. “Displace!”
That was the key. Shoot and move. Never stay in the same spot. We scrambled fifty yards down the ridge, set up, and fired again.
Down in the canyon, the order of the Banzai charge disintegrated into chaos. Officers were screaming, trying to regain control, but the explosions kept coming. We were targeting their command elements, picking off the officers with swords .
For an hour, thirty-two men held back four thousand.
But you can only fool an army for so long.
Eventually, they realized the volume of fire wasn’t matching the damage. They realized it was a harassment force.
“They’re climbing the ridges!” Russo shouted, changing a magazine.
I looked down. He was right. A wave of Japanese infantry was detaching from the main body and swarming up the slopes toward us. They were screaming, bayonets fixed.
“Pull back!” I ordered. “Smitty should have sent the message by now! We need to get out!”
But getting out wasn’t going to be easy. We had kicked the hornet’s nest, and now the hornets were angry.
The 73 Percent
We retreated into the jungle, moving fast. But the Japanese were faster. They knew this terrain better than we did. They were lighter, running on fanaticism.
We hit a clearing. A blocking force had circled around behind us.
“Ambush!”
The air filled with lead. I saw Peterson, a kid from Detroit who had been a car thief, spin around as a bullet caught him in the shoulder. He went down.
“Cover fire!”
Kowalski stood up. He didn’t take cover. He stood in the middle of the trail, leveling his bazooka. He fired a round into the tree line, blowing a hole in the Japanese ambush.
“Go! Get him out!” Kowalski roared.
He reloaded. Alone.
“Kowalski, move!” I screamed.
“Go, Lieutenant! I’ll hold ’em!”
He wasn’t a soldier following orders. He was a man making a choice. He was a “troublemaker” who had found his family, and he wasn’t going to let them die.
The Japanese swarmed the clearing. Kowalski fired his pistol, then swung the empty bazooka tube like a club. The last thing I saw was him disappearing under a pile of enemy soldiers.
We ran. We ran until our lungs burned and our legs felt like lead.
We lost three more men in the retreat. Miller took a piece of shrapnel in the gut. We had to drag him. He was cursing the whole way, talking about how he was going to steal the Emperor’s watch when this was over.
He died two miles from the American lines. We buried him in a shallow grave, covered with leaves. A thief to the end, stealing a resting place in foreign soil.
The Last Stand
We were down to twenty men. We were exhausted, out of ammo, and surrounded. The main Japanese force had regrouped and was pushing toward the 105th. We were caught in the middle.
We found a small cave complex near the edge of the Tanapag Plain. It was a natural fortress.
“This is it,” I said, collapsing against the rock wall. “We make our stand here.”
Russo looked at me. His face was a mask of blood and dirt. “We did it though, didn’t we? We warned them?”
“I hope so,” I said.
We set up our remaining weapons. We had a few grenades, some pistols, and our knives.
As dawn broke, the Banzai charge began in earnest. It was a terrifying sight. Thousands of men running across the plain, screaming. But this time, the Americans were waiting.
The artillery—the same artillery we had helped calibrate weeks ago—opened up. The naval guns joined in. The plain turned into a slaughterhouse.
But a spur of the attack came right at us.
“Fix bayonets!” I ordered.
It seemed absurd. 20 men against a wave. But we were the 40 Thieves. We didn’t play by the rules.
They hit our line. It was hand-to-hand combat. Primal. Brutal. I used my knife, the silent killing techniques I had taught them at Camp Tarawa now being used in the deafening roar of battle .
I saw Russo fighting two men at once. He moved with the grace of the bodyguard he used to be, parrying a bayonet thrust and driving his knife into the attacker’s ribs.
I saw Jones, a forger, using a rock to smash a soldier’s helmet.
We were fighting like wild animals. We were fighting like criminals. We were fighting like survivors.
And then, suddenly, it was over.
A platoon of Sherman tanks from the 2nd Marine Division rolled into view, their machine guns cutting down the remnants of the Japanese assault. The cavalry had arrived.
The Japanese retreated. The noise of battle faded into the moans of the dying.
I stood up, swaying on my feet. I looked around the cave entrance.
Bodies were everywhere. Ours. Theirs.
I counted the standing men.
Twelve.
Out of forty.
Colonel Rizley’s statisticians were wrong. It wasn’t 73%. It was 70%. We had beaten the odds by 3 percent.
The Aftermath
The battle for Saipan ended on July 9th, 1944. The island was declared secure.
I stood on the beach where we had landed almost a month earlier. The Higgins boats were loading the wounded. The sand was still churned up, but the artillery had stopped.
I held a piece of paper in my hand. The roster.
Forty names. Twenty-eight of them crossed out.
Russo limped up beside me. He had a bandage wrapped around his head, covering a nasty gash.
“You okay, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Russo,” I said. “Are you?”
He looked out at the ocean. “I’m alive. That’s more than I expected when I was sitting in that cell.”
“They’re going to give you a medal,” I said. “All of you. And a pardon. Your records are wiped clean.”
Russo laughed, lighting a cigarette. “A clean slate. Imagine that. What am I gonna do with a clean slate?”
“Maybe stop stealing jeeps,” I suggested.
“Let’s not get crazy, boss,” he grinned.
We watched the waves roll in. The 40 Thieves were no more. The platoon was combat ineffective. We had done the impossible. We had taken the worst men the Marine Corps had to offer—the dregs, the violent, the unwanted—and we had turned them into the most lethal fighting force on the island.
We had deployed 40 “criminals” against 30,000 Japanese soldiers . We had lived alone behind enemy lines . We had mapped the island, destroyed the bunkers, and broken the back of the enemy defense.
But the cost. God, the cost.
I thought of Evans, the kid who just wanted to belong. I thought of Kowalski, the boxer who went down swinging. I thought of Miller, the thief who died in the mud.
They weren’t criminals. Not out here. Out here, the laws of civilization didn’t apply. Out here, the only law was survival, and they were the judges.
Legacy
The war didn’t end on Saipan. We went on to Tinian, then Okinawa. But the “40 Thieves” were never the same. We were scattered, reassigned, or sent home.
But the experiment had worked. Colonel Rizley and the brass saw what we had done. They saw the value of small, highly trained units that could operate independently behind enemy lines. They saw that sometimes, you need men who don’t follow the manual—men who can think, adapt, and fight dirty .
Our platoon—the Marine Scout Snipers of Saipan—became a blueprint. The lessons we learned in blood at Camp Tarawa and in the jungles of the Marianas were written into new training manuals.
They started forming new units. Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT). Reconnaissance Companies. And eventually, decades later, something new.
Years after the war, I was watching the news. I saw a report about a new elite unit in the Navy. They were called SEALs (Sea, Air, and Land). They operated in small teams. They worked behind enemy lines. They were unconventional.
And I smiled.
Because I knew where they came from.
They came from the brig. They came from the punishment details. They came from a group of 40 men who stood on a beach in 1944 and decided that they would rather die fighting than live in a cage.
They came from us.
I folded the roster and put it in my pocket. The wind picked up, smelling of salt and freedom.
I was Frank Sullivan. I was a Marine. And I was the leader of the 40 Thieves.
And that was the greatest honor of my life.
(The End)
