Benjamin Salomon: Rambo Dentist

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

I once went eleven years between dental visits during one season in my life. I claimed it was because I was broke and couldn’t afford it. While that was indeed true, it was also because I so loathed the experience.

I will admit to a natural aversion to visiting the dentist. I am not alone in harboring those sentiments. Most of us have had a bad experience or three with our friendly neighborhood dental practitioner. It’s tough to get excited about somebody prodding around inside your sensitive mouth with a big, sharp steel pick.

Nowadays, my dentist and hygienist are both great friends. I actually look forward to catching up with Earl and Kelly while they exercise their art. They are both smart, personable, and competent. However, back in 1944, one particular dentist was all that and quite a bit more. Ben Salomon, DDS, was also one steely-eyed warrior.

Benjamin Salomon Origin Story

Benjamin Lewis Salomon was a skinny Jewish kid born in Milwaukee in 1914. He was an Eagle Scout who went on to attend the University of Southern California, where he earned his degree in dentistry. He began his civilian practice in 1937.

Three years later, at age 26 with the entire world at war, Dr. Salomon was drafted as an infantry private. He readily took to soldiering, qualifying as an expert with both the rifle and pistol in basic training. Two years later, in 1942, Uncle Sam suddenly realized PVT Salomon was actually a dentist and commissioned him a first lieutenant in the Army Dental Corps. He was subsequently assigned as the regimental dental officer to the 102d Infantry Regiment.

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Tactical Dentistry

We always got along swimmingly with our medical support guys back when I wore the uniform. In a combat aviation unit, this was a synergistic relationship. We let them ride the jump seat whenever they had a free afternoon, and they made sure our chiseled bodies remained in tip-top condition. However, there was still a broad gulf between our two worlds.

It was generally understood that the docs and dentists did not have to do PT every day or live like animals in the woods like the rest of us. That would represent a pretty serious waste of talent when they could be back in their clinics, saving the world. However, Ben Salomon was not a typical dentist. His commander declared him the regiment’s “best all-around soldier.” That’s pretty high praise for a humble grill doctor.

Salomon was promoted to captain and assigned as the regimental dental officer for the 105th Infantry Regiment headed for the Pacific. It was in this capacity in the summer of 1944 that CPT Salomon found himself hitting the beaches of Saipan. That’s when things got real.

Salomon Went From Drill and Fill to Proper War

With the chaos of an amphibious invasion exploding all around him, CPT Benjamin Salomon was at loose ends. In the midst of one of the most highly contested battles of the Pacific War, not a lot of soldiers were acutely concerned with oral hygiene. So when the 2d battalion surgeon was wounded, CPT Salomon volunteered to move forward and take his place.

Back then, you made do with what you had. A dentist was obviously not trained to perform meatball surgery, but the basics of suturing and hemorrhage control would translate to other body systems beyond just the mouth. CPT Salomon established his battalion aid station a mere fifty yards behind the forward line of foxholes. He was set up and operational just in time for a Japanese force of between 3,000 and 5,000 troops to assault his battalion front. This was one of the largest coordinated ground assaults the Japanese launched during the war, and it was pointed straight at Ben Salomon.

The orders from Japanese General Saito Yoshitsugu, commander of the attacking 43rd Division, were simple: “We will advance to attack the American forces and will all die an honorable death. Each man will kill ten Americans.”

The desperate Japanese thrust breached the battalion defenses in multiple places. CPT Salomon’s small tent was soon crammed with some 30 wounded men who had walked or crawled to his position. With his aid station packed beyond capacity, the defenses crumbled and the Japanese rushed in.

CPT Salomon Goes Full Chuck Norris

While CPT Salomon was working to stabilize a patient, he looked up and saw a Japanese soldier slip into his tent and bayonet a wounded American. Salomon snatched up a handy M1 rifle, dropped into a squatting position, and shot the enemy soldier dead. He then returned to working on his patients.

Two more Japanese infantrymen then pushed into the tent, only to be killed by nearby American troops. They were followed by four more who crawled underneath the tent walls. CPT Salomon was the only able-bodied American left standing. That’s when Benjamin Salomon went kind of nuts.

Salomon Turns Rambo

Survivors later reported that the enraged dentist kicked a knife out of one man’s hand and used it to kill him. He then grabbed a rifle, shot another, and skewered a third with his bayonet. He took the fourth Japanese soldier down with a butt-stroke so one of the wounded troops could finish him off with a .45. Realizing that things in his aid station were no longer tenable, CPT Salomon directed anyone who could move to flee to the rear and snatched up a fresh rifle. He then ran outside to hold off the advancing enemy troops and buy his men time to get to safety.

Outside, he found unfiltered bedlam. The aid station was established alongside a Browning M1917 water-cooled machine gun set up in a sandbagged fighting position. The four-man crew assigned to the weapon had all been killed by the swarming Japanese. Alone and cut off, CPT Salomon dropped in behind the big .30-caliber machine gun and went to work.

The Last Stand

The advancing Japanese swarmed through the battalion positions and pushed deep into American lines. It took several days for US forces to clear them out and regain the lost territory. When regimental forces finally recaptured the defensive works, they found CPT Benjamin Salomon’s dead body slumped over his gun. There were 98 dead Japanese soldiers stacked up in front of his firing position. Advancing US troops reported that CPT Salomon had moved the heavy water-cooled gun by himself at least four times to retain a clear field of fire around the growing mass of Japanese dead.

They found 76 bullet wounds in addition to numerous bayonet injuries on Salomon’s corpse. A post-mortem evaluation determined that 24 of his wounds were incurred while he was still alive. Despite being shot and stabbed literally to pieces, the indomitable dentist CPT Ben Salomon kept on killing the enemy until he just bled out. There is literally no telling how many American troops were saved through his sacrifice.

The Rest of the Story

CPT Salomon’s combat exploits were some of the most audacious of the war. The 27th Infantry Division historian, CPT Edmund Love, was part of the team that found the dead dentist’s body. He later said, “One could easily visualize Ben Salomon, wounded and bleeding, trying to drag that gun a few more feet so that he would have a new field of fire. The blood was on the ground, and the marks plainly indicated
how hard it must have been for him.”

Love penned the Medal of Honor recommendation immediately. However, the commanding general of the 27th ID returned the paperwork without action. CPT Salomon was a medical officer and technically a non-combatant. According to the Geneva Convention, he should not have been engaged in direct armed combat with the enemy.

The US Laws of Land Warfare allow for medical personnel to use personal weapons such as rifles and handguns in defensive applications, presuming the soldier is not wearing a Red Cross brassard, which CPT Salomon apparently was. Additionally, CPT Salomon was running a belt-fed machine gun all by his lonesome, killing 98 enemy troops in the process. Despite the fact that his actions were fully justified by any moral metric, no amount of literary creativity could synchronize his skillful operation of a crew-served weapon as being purely defensive in nature. As a result, his Medal of Honor recommendation simply languished.

Persistence Rewarded

CPT Love was not to be dissuaded. He resubmitted the paperwork again in 1951, only to be told that the time limit for submission had expired. In 1969, LTG Hal Jennings, the Surgeon General of the Army, tried again. This application was forwarded to the Secretary of Defense but also returned without action.

In 1998, Dr. Robert West, a dentist at USC, resubmitted the recommendation with the assistance of his congressman and MG Patrick Sculley, the chief of the Army Dental Corps. In May of 2002, President George W. Bush finally presented the Medal of Honor to Dr. West on CPT Salomon’s behalf. The medal is currently on permanent display at the Army Medical Department Museum in San Antonio, Texas.

Benjamin Salomon – True Hero

True heroes are spawned from some pretty weird secret sauce. I’ve been doing these weekly columns for several years now. Along the way I like to think I have developed a feel for their curious source code. CPT Ben Salomon was an archetype.

READ MORE HERE: Dr Dabbs – LT Stephen Peck: Nature versus Nurture

CPT Salomon – Distinguished Man

When his country called, Salomon abandoned what was likely a lucrative dental practice to slip into some dungarees and slog along with the infantry. Despite being a rear echelon support pogue, CPT Salomon stepped up to out-soldier grunts who were a decade younger. Though not a surgeon, Benjamin Salomon volunteered to work on the front lines saving lives, because that’s what needed to be done. His utterly selfless commitment to his nation and his troops ultimately killed him.

16 million Americans served during World War 2. A mere 473 of them earned the Medal of Honor. 266 of those died in the process. And yet, despite the unimaginably elite nature of this cohort, CPT Ben Salomon was still something even more.

Ben Salomon would have been fully within his rights to sit out the major combat on Saipan, onboard ship, someplace pulling teeth and filling cavities. Most folks in his position did just that and did so honorably. However, Salomon went so far beyond what was expected of him, willingly giving his full measure of devotion to save his buddies. In the nearly two and a half centuries that Americans have been fighting and dying for our Great Republic, CPT Ben Salomon distinguished himself as the very best of all of us.

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