Ben L. Salomon

Ben L. Salomon: The Dentist Who Held the Line

When American troops retook the ground on Saipan, they found a machine gun with a body slumped over it and ninety-eight dead Japanese soldiers piled in front of the position. The man at the gun was a captain in the Army Dental Corps. Examination of his body found seventy-six bullet wounds and numerous bayonet wounds; as many as twenty-four of them had been inflicted while he was still alive and still firing. It took the United States fifty-eight years to give him the Medal of Honor, and the reason for the delay is one of the strangest arguments in American military history.

Milwaukee to USC

Benjamin Lewis Salomon was born on 1 September 1914 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, into a Jewish family. He made Eagle Scout and graduated from Shorewood High School. He started at Marquette University, transferred to the University of Southern California, and came out of the USC School of Dentistry in 1937.

He was twenty-three, newly qualified, and he opened a private dental practice that year. Everything that follows makes sense only against that picture: a young professional man with a clean, prosperous, entirely ordinary future in front of him.

Drafted, and Very Good at It

The Selective Service Act caught him in the autumn of 1940. Salomon went in as a private in the 102nd Infantry Regiment — not as a dentist, as a rifleman — and he turned out to be unexpectedly good at it. He qualified as an expert marksman. Within a year he had made sergeant and was running a machine gun section. On 14 August 1942 his commanding officer named him the best all-around soldier in the unit.

That detail is not decoration. It is the hinge of the whole story. The Army eventually noticed it had a licensed dentist carrying a rifle and commissioned him into the Dental Corps in 1942, as a lieutenant in Hawaii. But the year he spent as an infantry NCO meant that when the moment came, he was not a doctor who happened to pick up a weapon. He was a trained machine gunner who happened to be wearing a Red Cross brassard.

By May 1943 he was regimental dental officer of the 105th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division. He made captain in 1944.

Saipan

The division went ashore on Saipan in June 1944, into one of the worst fights of the Pacific war. There was little for a regimental dentist to do. On 27 June the 2nd Battalion's surgeon was wounded, and Salomon volunteered to take his place — a dental officer stepping into a combat surgeon's job, which he was not trained for and did anyway.

By early July the Japanese position on the island was hopeless, and on Saipan hopelessness meant a final massed attack rather than a surrender. On the morning of 7 July, at around five o'clock, somewhere between three and five thousand Japanese troops came down on the 105th Infantry.

The Tent

Salomon's aid station was a tent roughly fifty yards behind the line of foxholes — close enough that when the line broke, it broke over him. He had about thirty wounded men inside.

The account assembled afterwards from witnesses is precise and almost unbearable. He saw a Japanese soldier bayoneting one of his patients through the side of the tent and shot him from a squatting position. More came through. He fought them inside the tent, with firearm and bayonet, in a space full of men who could not move. Then he ordered the wounded evacuated, took up an M1 Garand, and went outside to buy them the time to get out.

Four soldiers manning a machine gun near the aid station were killed. Salomon took the gun. He was found there afterwards with ninety-eight enemy dead in front of him and, on the evidence of his wounds, having gone on firing while being shot to pieces. The wounded he had ordered out got away.

Fifty-Eight Years

Captain Edmund G. Love wrote up the Medal of Honor recommendation almost immediately, at the request of General Ogden J. Ross. Major General George W. Griner, commanding the 27th Division, refused to forward it, and his reasoning was legal rather than factual: the Geneva Convention forbids medical personnel wearing the Red Cross brassard from bearing arms, and a machine gun is a crew-served weapon rather than a defensive personal arm. To decorate Salomon, the Army feared, was to endorse a violation.

It went on for half a century. Love resubmitted through the Office of the Chief of Military History in 1951 and was refused because the deadline had expired. Lieutenant General Hal B. Jennings, the Surgeon General, resubmitted in 1969. In 1970 Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor recommended approval — and the file came back without action. Only in 1998, when Dr Robert West of the USC School of Dentistry took it up through Congressman Brad Sherman, backed by Major General Patrick D. Sculley of the Army Dental Corps, did it move.

President George W. Bush presented the Medal of Honor posthumously on 1 May 2002, fifty-eight years after Saipan. Dr West accepted it and passed it to General Sculley for the Army Medical Department Museum in San Antonio; a replica hangs at the USC dental school. Salomon is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Why Ben Is Called a Genius

It has to be said plainly: this is not an intellectual claim, and pretending otherwise would insult him. Salomon made no discovery, wrote nothing, advanced no field. He was a competent young dentist with an ordinary practice. No source calls him a genius and none should.

What the record does support is a rare and specific competence that deserves to be described rather than swallowed by the word "heroism." Salomon's action was not a berserk last stand; it was a correctly sequenced tactical decision made under conditions that destroy most people's capacity to decide anything. He recognised in seconds that the tent was indefensible and that thirty immobile men could not be protected by defending it. He cleared the immediate threat. He ordered the evacuation. He then moved the fight outside and away from his patients, and he took over the one weapon on the position capable of holding several thousand attackers for the minutes the evacuation required. Each of those was the right move, taken in order, by a man who had thirty seconds to think.

That he could do it at all was an accident of biography — the year as an infantry sergeant, the marksmanship badge, the machine gun section. The judgment was his own. If genius applies here, it applies to a form almost never named: the ability to keep processing a problem accurately while being killed. The counter-case is simply that this is courage and training, and that framing it as intellect makes a moral act sound like a clever one. That objection is largely right. But something in his conduct was more than nerve: he was thinking, the thinking was correct, and the men he sent out of that tent lived because of it.

Legacy

Salomon is one of only three dental officers ever awarded the Medal of Honor, alongside Alexander Gordon Lyle and Weedon Osborne, and one of three Jewish Americans to receive it for the Second World War. The half-century fight over his citation forced the Army to confront a real tension in the laws of war — what a medical officer may do when the enemy is inside his aid station killing his patients — and the eventual answer, that defending the wounded in his care did not disqualify him, is the settled reading now. Every American military dentist since 2002 has served in the shadow of a man who was, by trade, one of them.

Achievements

• Medal of Honor — 2002