The end of the fighting on Saipan

At 4.15 p.m. on 9 July 1944 Vice Admiral Richmond Turner, commander of the amphibious forces, announced that Saipan was “secured”. A few hours earlier units of the 4th Marine Division had reached Marpi Point, the northern tip of the island. After 24 days of fighting that had begun with the landing on 15 June, the Americans had taken the first island that had belonged to Japan before the war, and a base from which heavy bombers could reach Tokyo. Organised resistance had ended two days earlier, when the remnants of the garrison died in a last, suicidal attack on the Tanapag plain.

Many chronologies state that the Japanese lost “more than 30,000 soldiers” and that in the final phase of the fighting many civilians committed suicide “at the urging of the Japanese military”. According to American estimates, the island’s garrison numbered about 30,000 army and navy personnel, not markedly more; almost all of them were killed. The word “urging”, for its part, needs explaining: the civilians’ deaths were the result of years of propaganda, pressure from the military and, in some cases, outright coercion – not merely encouragement.

The last days

After the attack of 7 July the 2nd Marine Division combed the west coast and the Tanapag plain, while the 4th Division, together with the Army’s 165th Infantry Regiment, advanced across the plateau in the north towards Marpi Point. The Japanese no longer formed a defensive line – scattered groups held out in caves, ravines and thickets and were cleared out with grenades, explosive charges and flamethrowers. On the afternoon of 9 July the three regiments of the 4th Division, advancing abreast, reached the shore.

Turner’s announcement did not mean the end of the shooting. That same day some Japanese soldiers swam out to the reefs in Tanapag Harbor and refused to surrender. A detachment sent against them in amphibian tractors met machine-gun fire; most of the Japanese were killed, and on one of the reefs, as the Americans recorded, a Japanese officer beheaded his own soldiers with a sword before he himself was shot. The marines went on searching the caves on the north coast for several more days, and on 13 July they took the islet of Maniagassa in the harbour. Then both divisions began preparing for the landing on neighbouring Tinian, and further clearing of the island was taken over by the Army’s 27th Infantry Division, which did not finish its organised mopping-up until the beginning of August.

Civilians at the northern tip of the island

Saipan was the first island of the Pacific War on which the Americans fought among a large civilian population. Before the invasion, according to various estimates, between 20,000 and 30,000 civilians lived there: above all Japanese settlers, many of them from Okinawa, who worked on the sugar-cane plantations, as well as Koreans – including labourers brought in by force to build fortifications – and the indigenous inhabitants of the archipelago, the Chamorros and Carolinians, of whom there were about 4,000. As the front moved north, thousands of people fled with the troops into the hills and caves, and in the end onto the scrap of land at Marpi Point.

There, in the last days of the fighting and for several days after 9 July, scenes took place that American soldiers and correspondents described as the most terrible of the whole war. People threw themselves off a high inland escarpment later named Suicide Cliff, and off the seaside rocks of the point, which the Americans called Banzai Cliff. Mothers jumped with children in their arms, families blew themselves up with grenades handed out by soldiers, and fathers killed their wives and children before taking their own lives. The water below the point was in places so thick with bodies that – as the US official history recorded – boats could not pass without running into them. Interpreters, including Japanese Americans from US intelligence and prisoners, urged people through loudspeakers to come out of hiding; some listened, while some of those who hesitated before jumping were shot by Japanese soldiers hiding nearby.

The number of victims is uncertain. It is most often said that about a thousand civilians committed suicide, although estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. All the civilians who died during the battle – from bombs and shelling, in crossfire, in caves being cleared and by their own hand – are estimated at 8,000–10,000.

There were several causes. For years Japanese propaganda had portrayed the Americans as barbarians who raped women and tortured and murdered prisoners; many civilians believed it. The military code, the Senjinkun, forbade soldiers to surrender, and in practice this requirement was extended to the population. Soldiers often prevented civilians from going over to the Americans, and forced some of them to die. Some historians, among them Herbert Bix, also link these events to a decision taken in Tokyo at the end of June: according to their findings, Emperor Hirohito expressed the wish that the civilians on Saipan should die rather than fall into enemy hands, and those who died were promised the same status in the afterlife as fallen soldiers. The content, date and circulation of this instruction remain disputed, and it is not known whether it ever reached the people on the cut-off island. The deaths of many of them can therefore hardly be called a voluntary choice.

The Americans placed the surviving civilians in an internment camp at Susupe on the west coast, separating the Japanese from the Koreans and from the Chamorros and Carolinians; according to various tallies, between about 14,000 and 18,000 people ended up there. Conditions in the first weeks were primitive, but for thousands of people the camp meant the end of the war. Many Chamorros lost relatives, homes and land in the battle, even though they themselves had had no say in their island becoming a battlefield.

The toll

The Japanese garrison – some 30,000 army and navy personnel, including Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saitō’s 43rd Division – was almost entirely wiped out. About 1,700 people were taken prisoner, roughly half of them Korean labourers; there were fewer than a thousand military prisoners. Saitō and Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo took their own lives on 6 or 7 July. Of the roughly 71,000 American troops who took part in the fighting, between 3,100 and 3,400 were killed or died of wounds, according to various tallies, and more than 13,000 were wounded – about 20 per cent of the force, similar to Tarawa. It was the bloodiest battle in the Pacific for the Americans up to that time.

Not all the Japanese died or surrendered. In the jungle on the slopes of Mount Tapotchau Captain Sakae Ōba gathered several dozen soldiers and more than two hundred civilians. For sixteen months his group eluded American patrols and raided supply dumps; Ōba led his men out of the jungle and laid down his arms only on 1 December 1945, three months after Japan’s surrender, when a former Japanese brigade commander convinced him that the war really was over.

Shock in Tokyo

Saipan lay within the “absolute national defence sphere” that Japan had drawn up in September 1943 and was to defend at all costs. When in the second half of June it became clear that the island could not be held, plans to retake it from the sea were still being considered in Tokyo, but after the fleet’s defeat in the Philippine Sea there was nothing left with which to carry them out. Hirohito, who had at first pressed for a counter-attack, accepted the loss of the island at the end of June. The public learned of the loss of the island from an official communiqué only in mid-July, but the ruling elite knew of it earlier and was shaken. The influential former prime ministers, the so-called jūshin, and the imperial court, long critical of the government, decided that Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō had to go; after failed attempts to reshape his cabinet, Tōjō resigned on 18 July and was succeeded by General Kuniaki Koiso.

Place in the war

For the Americans the most important prize was the airfields. The Japanese Aslito airfield in the south of the island, captured in June, was enlarged by the Seabees and named Isely Field – after Commander Robert Isely, a naval aviator shot down over it during the preparations for the invasion. On 12 October 1944 the first B-29 Superfortress landed there, and in November the first raid on Tokyo took off from Saipan. From then on the strategic bombing offensive against Japan was conducted from the Marianas rather than from distant bases in China.

After Saipan it was the turn of the neighbouring islands – Guam and Tinian – and the American command remembered the lesson of Marpi Point. The image of civilians leaping from the cliffs reinforced its conviction that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would cost enormous losses not only among soldiers but also among the population. Similar tragedies were repeated in the spring of 1945 on Okinawa, on a far greater scale.