ABOVE: Fred Saiz shortly after boot camp in 1942. On 31 January 1945, General Douglas MacArthur issued the order “Go to Manila! Go around the Japs, bounce off the Japs, save your men, but get to Manila! Free the internees at Santo Tomas! Take the Malacanan Palace (the presidential palace) and the legislative building!” The next day, the “flying column,” as the mobile unit came to be known, jumped off to slice through 100 miles of Japanese territory. Fred was a member of this high risk flying column “ that was able to overcome or go around all obstacles in its path and rescue the internees.
When I was nineteen I joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. As soon as I turned twenty-one I had to sign up for the draft, and it wasn’t long before I got my notice. I was drafted into the Army in March 1941, and they sent me to Fort Bliss, Texas, to the First Cavalry Division. I was with them until I got out, that same group. While I was at Fort Bliss they bombed Pearl Harbor, and then we knew we were in it! So they sent us home for a week. We had maneuvers in Louisiana the summer of 1942, and then they sent us to Australia. We trained in Australia about ten or fifteen miles north of Brisbane, up in the mountains. We built a camp over there, and we trained for about a year before we were ready for New Guinea.
When we got to New Guinea—the first place we went—the landing had already been made, and we just went in as a mop-up operation at Oro Bay. Then from there we went into the Admiralty Islands, and that was rough. We had our first combat landing there, and there were several islands we fought on. We first landed at Los Negros, and then at Manus, and then a couple of smaller islands. When we went in there we were on LSTS until we got close to the island, and then we got into landing craft from the LSTS. On the landing craft, they would let the front end down when we got to the beach. That first landing under fire was something. I was thinking I just wanted to find a hole! But we kept on going. What had happened, the battleships had shelled the hell out of the beach and the area right behind, and the airplanes had bombed it just before we landed. The Japanese had moved back, so it wasn’t too bad getting in to the beaches. We didn’t really get shot at too much until we got inland, and you just keep shooting back. We were well trained and knew what to do.
We had been together so long we were just like a family. We protected each other, but it made it hard when we had casualties. You’d take care of them as best you could, and then you’d keep on going. But it was hard when guys started getting shot. One time a mortar shell landed right next to where the mortar platoon was. I was in a hole nearby, and the mortar shell hit right where those guys were. I went over to pick one guy up, and his guts were all gone. A big piece of shrapnel had torn him apart. I put my hands underneath to turn him over, and there was nothing underneath. It was sickening, and he was one of my buddies, which made it real hard. But you just have to keep on going. You try to help the ones that are alive.
It was rough fighting the Japanese in the Admiralties. There was an Imperial Marine Division in there, and they were one of the top units in the Japanese military. They were big, and they were good fighters. When we were fighting the Japanese, morning and night was all the same, you’d just stay awake all the time. I’d maybe sleep a little bit in the foxhole while my buddy was on guard, and then we’d switch and I’d keep a lookout while he tried to sleep a little bit. The Marines were in Guadalcanal way before we got into New Guinea, so we had a lot of good information from them about how the Japanese fought. We kind of knew what to expect, that they would probably fight to the death, and that we’d have banzai attacks.
The first thing they warned us about was not to sleep in a hammock, because the Japs would cut you to pieces. We had these hammocks that we’d string from one tree to another, and they had a zipper lining so the mosquitoes wouldn’t get in to you. They were comfortable, especially when it was raining. But that was a death trap. The Japanese would be watching out for that from the jungle, and they would come in at night with their bayonets and butcher you if you were in one. So we were warned about that. Then what we’d do was put our hammocks up, dig our hole, form a fire line, and we’d wait for them. And that’s how we survived.
Another thing we learned from the Marines that probably saved my life was to dig three foxholes just a short distance apart for each machine gun. Then when the Japs were attacking, you would first shoot from one hole, and then quickly go over to the next and shoot from there, and then switch to the third. The reason was that if you stayed in the same hole, the Japs would zero in on you. We figured we only had about two or three minutes that we could stay and shoot that machine gun out of one hole before we had to move. And that’s exactly what happened one time. I was shooting my machine gun from one hole, and I’d just gone over to the next hole when a Jap hand grenade came flying into the hole I’d just left. It blew up, and if I’d have been in there I’d have been killed.
Sometimes the Japanese would be dug into holes and bunkers, but a lot of the time we would have to patrol looking for them, and we’d have to spot them. We patrolled a lot, and this was all in the jungle, and that was quite a bit different from what we were used to from training in the States. But you know, we got used to it. You adapt to it, you know the terrain, you know what you’re expected to do, and you just watch your step, and you watch everybody’s back.
We had the same guys all the way through, the ones we started with back in the States. I was a rifleman and machine gunner, and I had the same sergeant for my squad all the way through, although we lost some of our guys in these various operations. There were 230 men in our troop when we went overseas. When we came back there were only 108 from the original ones that went. So as we went along we got replacements. When you get replacements you have to train them, and you have to work with them and keep training them. There was one incident that happened in the Admiralties that involved replacements. We’d just about finished clearing out those islands, but there was another island across from where we were camped. They sent us on a patrol up there with about twelve replacements, and we were to train them on how to go on patrol. Well, we encountered some Japanese over there, and they kind of pinned us down on a ridge, so we stayed overnight that night. But we had also taken a desk sergeant with us. He wanted to go on patrol to see if he could kill a Jap, so he went with us.
That night we were pinned down and couldn’t get back to our camp by the beach. We couldn’t do anything more about it that night, so we set guards around and dug in to spend the night. We’d fight our way out the next morning. This was more than the desk sergeant had bargained for. About midnight he got worried and went to check on one of the guards, who was one of the replacements. The guy on guard had heard that the Japanese would sneak up on you, and you’d have to be very careful. So he heard footsteps behind him, turned around, and shot the sergeant, shot him through the right shoulder. We bandaged him up as best we could, but he needed medical attention back at the camp.
So that night I had to go down to where the camp was and tell them what had happened, to arrange to get that sergeant out of there. So I snuck off this ridge, and it took me about two or three hours to get down there. I was alone because you had a better chance of sneaking out of that situation in the dark by yourself. So I snuck out and went down the trail in the dark to our camp to arrange for a stretcher and a radio. It took me a while since it was dark, and I got back to the camp about 4 A.M. They called for a PBY flying boat to come and pick the sergeant up the next morning, assuming we could get him down off the ridge and back to the camp. So we took a stretcher and started heading back in the direction of where he was. By the time we got back up close to that ridge it was about eight or nine in the morning, and the guys were coming down with him. The Japs had left overnight, and our guys started down with him right at dawn. They had made a stretcher out of their jackets and bamboo poles, and they were bringing him down, which was pretty rough. When we met up with them, we put him on the regular stretcher and took him the rest of the way down to the camp. The plane came in and picked him up, and he lived. They ended up giving me a Bronze Star for that.
So here was a guy who wasn’t trained for combat, but he wanted to kill a Jap and almost got himself killed! He was a desk sergeant in the orderly room, and he never had even carried a gun! So it was bad judgment for him to be up there in the first place, in a combat situation. Then it was inexperience on his part to get up and walk around at night when we were all looking for the Japs to infiltrate our lines, like they always did. You never got up and walked anywhere at night! And then it was inexperience on the part of the replacement who shot him. That’s why we had to train the replacements. Otherwise they could get themselves and the rest of us in trouble.
I think we were in the Admiralties for about a year. After we cleared those islands we stayed there for quite a while. And from there we went in on the Leyte landing in the Philippines. I was right in the first wave. We hit Tacloban there by the airfield. We went right through Tacloban and on from there. After we cleaned that island, we jumped over the San Jacinto Strait and went over to Samar. It was just a little strait that we could cross in boats and on bridges. So we crossed over there, and the Japanese were fighting pretty much the same way, out of the jungles. It was the same tactics they’d used in the Admiralties. They were going hit-and-run, and they’d come in at night or they’d ambush you on the trails.
From there we came back to Leyte, loaded up on ships, and went to Lingayen on Luzon and landed there. And from there we went straight into Manila. We made a wild dash to Manila. They wanted us to get in as quick as we could. We bypassed everything, and we just kept on going. We had tanks, Jeeps, and half tracks, and I was riding in a Jeep most of the time. We were trying to get to Manila as quick as we could, because our assignment was to get to Santo Tomas and liberate the American civilians being kept prisoner there. We were afraid that if we waited, the Japs would start killing them. We knew exactly where they were. We got the intelligence information and knew right where to go.
We encountered a lot of resistance along the way, and the Japanese would kind of hold us down for a while, but we kept on moving. So we went straight in there to Santo Tomas, which I guess had been some kind of college, and we knocked the wall down with the tanks, and there were all the American civilian prisoners in their little huts all over the backyard there. There was a big backyard behind the main building, and the buildings and grounds were behind this big wall. When we hit the wall the Japanese guards got out of there. Those prisoners were happy to see us! They were skinny and starved.
So we stood around there for a while waiting for more troops to come in, and then we kept on moving. What we had to do next was to take Manila, and that was house-to-house fighting. That was an altogether different kind of combat from anything we had done before. We hadn’t been trained to fight house-to-house, and we just had to figure it out as we went along. We had been trained as jungle fighters. A lot of times we’d hit some resistance, and we’d call for artillery to help us, and they’d fire point blank at the buildings. And the Japanese resisted all the way.
There were a lot of Philippine civilians killed in Manila during that fighting. Luckily most people got out of the way and ran out, and the city was almost deserted. But of the ones that stayed, a lot of them got killed. Sometimes the Japanese would use the Philippine civilians as human shields when they were trying to get away. The Japs would grab them and drag them in front of them. We couldn’t shoot at the Japanese when they had civilians in front of them.
Crossing the Pasig River was pretty rough. It was the main river that flowed right through the city, and it was a big, wide river. We fought at the old post office, and we tore that place up. It was a big old building about five or six stories high right by the river, and we had to go through there. We were fighting floor-to-floor inside the post office, because the Japanese were holed up in there. There was also a church nearby that got bombed. The front end of the church got blown up, but the altar and everything stayed put. Everything was just perfect except the front end of the church.
So we got through Manila and kept on going, on north of the city to Taytay and other towns north of there, until we cleaned out that whole area and had it pretty well under control. After that we went to a rest camp maybe eighty miles or so outside Manila, and we camped there for a while. Then we started training there for a landing in Tokyo Bay. We were trained and ready when they dropped the bombs to end the war. We didn’t know what was really happening until the Japanese started giving up, and then we got word the war was over and the Japanese were surrendering.
They said the guys who had more than 85 points could come back to the States. I think most of our division had more than a 100, so we got replaced right there in Luzon, and they sent us to Manila to wait for a ship to take us back to the States. We came straight back on a casualty ship. We had to help the guys who were in casts, and all that, and we were like nurses until we got to the States. We didn’t make any stops, and we came straight back to San Francisco. I got out of the Army about a week later. They put us on a troop train that got us into Denver, to Fort Logan, and I got discharged there.
I came close to getting killed a lot of times. All of us did. I still have a little piece of shrapnel in my back that they never took out. An artillery shell exploded close to me. There was a big chunk of that shell that they took out of my back, but they left the little piece in there. The shell fragment hit a tree first, so it didn’t go in too deep, but that was the worst wound I ever got. That was in the Philippines at Leyte. There was a field hospital not too far from the front lines, so after I got hit I went down there, and the doctor pulled the fragment out and put some sulfa in the wound and bandaged it up. I just laid there for a while talking to him, and the next morning I went back to my outfit.
One time I was making my way up a hill through the jungle and there were a lot of holes where Japanese could have been, so I was walking up there with my machine gun just spraying back and forth. Then the gun jammed, so I stopped to try and fix it and was looking down at the machine gun and working on it. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a Japanese soldier running at me. He had a rifle with a bayonet on the end of it, and he was charging right at me. I didn’t have time to do anything but throw the machine gun at him as he lunged at me. That knocked his bayonet to one side, but then he just brought up the butt end of his rifle and hit me right in the forehead with it, just under the brim of my helmet. That sent me flying backward and onto the ground, but before that Jap could finish me off, some of the guys in my squad, who were right behind me, shot him. I still have a knot on my forehead to this day from where that Jap hit me with his rifle butt.
A lot of times we could see the Japanese as they came at us. They’d make banzai charges at night, and that’s how they’d come at you. We’d be ready for them, dug in since we knew they’d be coming. We had our fire lines, and everyone had a certain area to fire at, and all that ground was covered with flying bullets when they’d come in. It was all pretty well organized. But it was hard to stop all of them, and we had Japanese that got pretty close, right up to our lines before they got shot. They’d come right in to you. I think the closest they ever got to me was about ten feet away, but we’d always get them before they got to us. Sometimes the Japs would run out of bullets, and they’d come at you with a bayonet on the end of their rifles. A lot of the time their supply lines had been cut, and they would run out of ammunition. So they had to fight with whatever they had, and it was mostly knives and bayonets. That’s why they’d fight more at night than in the daytime. We’d never run out of ammunition, and we’d shoot as fast as we could to make it hard for them to get up close to our lines. We’d use artillery support a lot, and we had the Army Air Force, too. We could call in artillery or air strikes to where the Japanese would be, and the Air Force would strafe them to soften them up for us.
Almost all the Japanese carried flags on them, and these were white with a red ball in the middle and lots of Japanese writing on them. So if we had a night attack, there would be bodies laying around in the morning, and every time we killed one of them we’d search their pack and take what they had. We got a lot of souvenirs, and we’d sell them to the Navy. The Navy would buy anything! They wanted souvenirs real bad. We’d even trade souvenirs for whiskey or whatever they had. We had a lot of samurai swords, but we had to leave them there. We couldn’t bring anything like that home with us. They said that some of the officers were able to ship them home, but we couldn’t. So I brought back one of those Japanese flags. My kids and grandkids had it framed for me, and it’s hanging on the wall in my barbershop today.
We took Atabrine all the time for malaria, so we all turned yellow. We were all just as yellow as could be! But when I got discharged and came back to the States and stopped taking Atabrine, I came down with malaria after the Atabrine got out of my system. I had malaria for probably twenty years. This happened to a lot of GIS. I had lived in Rocky Ford, Colorado, and then moved to Boulder, and I found a doctor who was from Austria, Dr. Weicker, and he’s the one who cured me. He was very familiar with malaria, started giving me some treatments, and pretty soon I started getting better.
I was in pretty good shape when I got back from the Pacific, except for that malaria thing. But I lost my hearing, and I still can’t hear very well today. I guess that came from all the noise of the artillery shells and gunfire. And when I got back I had some trouble with nightmares, though my wife Kate can tell more about that than I can! I’d have bad dreams and she’d try to wake me up and straighten me out. She says I’d be making strangling noises and thrashing around with my arms, and that really worried her. She’d have to be careful in waking me up because I’d be swinging my arms around. I’d dream the Japanese were coming at me at night with their bayonets. In the Pacific we knew they were coming and we’d stop them, but in my dreams they’d get to us, and that’s kind of scary. I had those dreams for a long time. Sometimes I’d go for a long time without dreaming, and then all of a sudden I’d have a nightmare. I’m eighty-five years old [in 2004], and I just had one about three months ago.
When I was nineteen in the Civilian Conservation Corps, I started cutting hair. Then when I turned twenty-one and went into the service, I cut hair at Fort Bliss for three or four guys from my outfit. And when I went overseas, I took some hand clippers, and I cut hair overseas. Every time we were in rest camp, I’d cut my friends’ hair with hand clippers. Then when I came back I didn’t know what else to do, so I went to barber school and got my barber’s license. I came up to Boulder in the spring of 1946, and I have been cutting hair there ever since.