The end of the fighting on Guam

On 10 August 1944 Major General Roy Geiger of the Marine Corps, commander of III Amphibious Corps, announced that organised Japanese resistance on Guam had ceased. Twenty days had passed since the landing of 21 July. That same day the heavy cruiser Indianapolis entered Apra Harbor carrying Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Alexander Vandegrift. Guam, taken by the Japanese on 10 December 1941, was the first American territory to be recovered in the war.

It is often said that Guam was liberated on 10 August and that “all the Marianas are now in American hands”. The date corresponds to the American announcement, but it needs two qualifications. First, only organised fighting ended on 10 August: the commander of the Japanese 31st Army was killed the next day, and thousands of soldiers hid in the jungle for many months afterwards. Second, the three largest islands of the archipelago – Saipan, Tinian and Guam – were in American hands, but not all the Marianas: Rota, Pagan and several smaller islands remained Japanese until Japan’s surrender in 1945.

The pursuit to the north

After the beachheads had been joined and the Orote Peninsula taken at the turn of July and August, the remnants of the Japanese forces fell back to the north under Lieutenant General Hideyoshi Obata, commander of the 31st Army, who had taken over the defence of the island after the death of Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina on 28 July. On 31 July Geiger set off after them with two divisions: the 3rd Marine Division on the left and the army’s 77th Infantry Division on the right. That day the Marines entered the ruined capital of the island, Agana, and on 1 August they took Tiyan airfield.

Northern Guam is a limestone plateau covered in dense jungle, with a few hills and crossed by only a handful of roads. The maps were inaccurate, the rainy season turned the roads to mud, and units lost touch with one another; Japanese groups slipped through gaps in the line. Obata set up his main defensive line around Mount Barrigada. After fighting from 2 to 4 August this line collapsed. On 7 August the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade went back into the line on the left flank, and the 307th Infantry Regiment of the 77th Division took the village of Yigo after a brief clash with tanks. On 8 August the same regiment captured the fortified Mount Santa Rosa, where the Japanese had been expected to fight their last battle. Over the following days the Americans reached the island’s northern cliffs.

The Mataguac caves

Geiger’s announcement did not reach everyone. On 10 August the 1st Battalion of the 306th Infantry Regiment came upon caves below Mount Mataguac and in the ensuing fight lost eight killed and seventeen wounded, before pulling back for the night. The caves housed Obata’s headquarters. From there the general sent his last report to Imperial General Headquarters. In it he wrote that since the loss of Saipan the fighting had not gone the Japanese way, that officers and men had been killed, weapons destroyed and ammunition spent, and that only “bare hands” were left to fight with. “Holding Guam has become hopeless,” he reported, announcing a last stand at Mataguac the following day. He added that his only fear was that news of the garrison’s “honourable death” might shake the people of Japan, and he asked for state assistance for the families of the fallen.

On the morning of 11 August the battalion returned with tanks and sealed the cave entrances with explosives. Obata died that day; according to American accounts, he took his own life during this final fight. The most senior Japanese officer left on the island was the 31st Army’s chief of staff, Major General Yoshitomo Tamura, who committed suicide on 22 August.

Stragglers in the jungle

The end of organised fighting did not mean that the garrison had ceased to exist. On 12 August the Americans estimated the number of Japanese killed at more than 11,000. Since there had been some 18,500 Japanese soldiers and sailors on Guam on 21 July, between 7,500 and 10,000 men – according to various estimates of the time – might have been hiding in the jungle. The Marines and the army hunted them down for months, and in November 1944 a police unit made up of Chamorros was formed to deal with the stragglers.

Most of those in hiding had neither weapons nor ammunition, and food became their main concern. Some were killed in the sweeps, others died of hunger and disease. One of the larger groups, Major Seihachi Satō and 34 men, surrendered on 11 June 1945. After Japan’s surrender, leaflets ordering them to give themselves up were dropped over the jungle; on 4 September 1945 Lieutenant Colonel Hideyuki Takeda, the 31st Army’s operations officer, came in to the Americans with 67 soldiers, and the last organised unit surrendered on 12 September. By the end of August 1945, according to American figures, some 18,400 Japanese had been killed and about 1,250 taken prisoner; the garrison had thus been almost entirely wiped out.

Individual soldiers held out even longer. Sergeant Masashi Itō surrendered in May 1960, and on 24 January 1972 hunters near the Talofofo Falls came upon Sergeant Shōichi Yokoi, who had survived in hiding for 28 years. He became one of the best-known cases of Japanese holdouts after the war.

The islanders

For the Chamorros, Guam’s indigenous people, the end of the fighting closed an occupation of more than two and a half years, whose last weeks had brought forced labour, the herding of the population into camps in the interior and massacres such as the one in the Merizo district in mid-July. Yet it was not 10 August that was regarded as liberation, but the day of the landing: Nimitz declared 21 July an island holiday, and it is still celebrated on Guam as Liberation Day. In mid-August, according to American figures, some 18,000 Chamorros were in refugee camps, many of them malnourished, sick or wounded; according to American estimates, about 600 civilians were killed in the fighting. The islanders provided the Americans with guides and information, and later served in the units hunting down stragglers. The Chamorros received full American citizenship only in 1950, when the administration of the island passed from the navy to civilian hands.

Not all the Marianas

The statement that after 10 August “all the Marianas” were in American hands is not accurate. The Americans took only the islands they needed for bases and bypassed the rest. Rota, lying between Guam and Tinian, with a garrison of almost 2,800 army and navy personnel according to American figures, was only bombed until the end of the war – partly to silence its radio station, which warned Japan of B-29 take-offs – and surrendered on 2 September 1945. Likewise left to one side were Pagan in the north of the archipelago, whose isolated garrison, supplied only sporadically by submarines, suffered from hunger, and the islet of Aguijan near Tinian, where the Japanese laid down their arms on 4 September 1945. The isolated islands had no military significance, however: the Americans had gained control of the archipelago, its harbours and its airfields in August 1944.

A base for the offensive

Work on turning Guam into a great base began at once. As early as 5 August, while the fighting was still going on, the Seabees began building piers in Apra Harbor, which over the following months was dredged and protected by a breakwater. The airfield on Orote was rebuilt and lengthened, and near Agana an airfield was built on which the first B-29s landed in November 1944. In the north of the island army engineers built two large bomber airfields – North Field, opened on 3 February 1945, from which the first B-29 raid from Guam took off on 24 February, and Northwest Field, in operation from June. At the end of January 1945 Nimitz moved his advanced headquarters to the island from Pearl Harbor. Guam’s hospitals, with some 9,000 beds between them, took in the wounded from Iwo Jima, and by August 1945 more than 200,000 American soldiers, sailors and airmen were stationed on the island.

Place in the war

The fall of Guam – after Saipan and Tinian, taken on 1 August – completed Operation Forager. The Americans had broken through the “absolute national defence sphere” that Tokyo had drawn up in September 1943, and the defeat in the Marianas had already cost Hideki Tōjō’s government its power in July. Losses in the battle for Guam were heavy: according to official figures, the Americans lost about 1,750 killed and died of wounds and some 6,000 wounded.

From then on the Marianas became the hub of America’s war against Japan. From the airfields of Saipan, Tinian and Guam B-29 bombers could reach Japanese cities, and Apra Harbor and Nimitz’s headquarters on Guam gave the fleet a base closer to the front than Hawaii. When Guam fell, the argument over the onward road to Japan – via the Philippines or via Formosa – was still going on, but the Marianas were already the starting point for both options. Troops and ships later set out from them for Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and in the autumn of 1944 the strategic bombing offensive against Japan began from there.

The Japanese army drew the lesson from the Marianas that landings should not be thrown back into the sea by costly counter-attacks, but that the defence should be conducted inland, from caves and bunkers, so as to bleed the enemy for as long as possible. This change made the fighting on Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa longer and bloodier than on Guam. The island itself remained one of the most important American bases in the Pacific after the war – the former North Field is today’s Andersen Air Force Base – and the memory of occupation and liberation is still alive there today.