“‘Our war was lost with the loss of Saipan,’ one of Emperor Hirohito’s admiral’s observed.”
IT WAS JUNE, 1944.
Nine days had passed since D-Day and the beginning of the long-awaited liberation of France. Now, half a world away, a new front in the war against the Axis was about to open.
At exactly 7 a.m. local time on June 15, the first of more than 300 tracked landing craft, each loaded with a platoon of Marines, rolled out of the surf and onto the tropical beaches of Saipan. As bullets and shells burst around them, the soldiers aboard scrambled ashore and began a desperate fight for a foothold on the tiny South Pacific island.
At the time, the Unites States was already two years into its Pacific island-hopping campaign. And with every new victory, from Guadalcanal to the Gilberts and Marshalls, U.S. forces were inching ever closer to Japan itself. If Saipan, the largest landfall in the strategically vital Northern Marianas, could be captured, it would put Tokyo within striking range of American B-29 bombers.
Knowing this, the Japanese fought ferociously to keep the tiny 43-square-mile strip of territory. What followed was one the most savage battles of the Pacific War, a conflict already notorious for its astonishing brutality. The struggle for control of Saipan, part of the larger Operation Forager, would rage with bitter intensity for 24 days, creating tens of thousands of casualties, both military and civilian.
U.S. Marine Corps General Holland Smith called it “the decisive battle of the Pacific.” The Japanese agreed. In fact, the Empire’s defeat there triggered a political crisis that hastened Tokyo’s inevitable collapse a little more than one year later.
“Our war was lost with the loss of Saipan,” one of Emperor Hirohito’s admiral’s observed.
Amazingly, despite the monumental importance of the Battle of Saipan, few today could even list it as one of the Second World War’s decisive engagements. So, to mark the 75th anniversary of the campaign this month, MHN has compiled the following list of essential facts.
Saipan was the lynchpin of Japan’s defensive perimeter
Japan seized Saipan, and its smaller neighbouring sister island Tinian, from Imperial Germany in 1914 shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. Berlin had purchased the colony from the bankrupt Spanish Empire 15 just years earlier. Tokyo’s control over Saipan was formally recognized five years later in the Treaty of Versailles.
Over the next two decades, Saipan would grow to become one of Japan’s most important offshore territorial possessions. Sugar plantations and refineries were established there, infrastructure was built and more than 25,000 settlers colonized the island. Half of them became residents of Garapan, Saipan’s only city, which was soon dubbed the “Tokyo of the South Seas.”
In the lead-up to the Second World War, Saipan would become a crucial link in the scattered chain of islands that made up the defensive ‘inner perimeter’ of Japan’s sprawling empire. By the time of the U.S. invasion in 1944, Tokyo had garrisoned 30,000 troops on the five-by-12-mile landmass. The defenders also installed a string of artillery batteries, concrete fortifications and a military air field. Saipan’s beaches were protected by a labyrinth of barbed wire entanglements, trenches and machine gun nests, while inland sat a vast network of bunkers and caves some outfitted with steel doors.
Recognizing its monumental importance to Tokyo’s war strategy, Japanese commanders fully expected Saipan to be targeted for invasion.
“The fate of the Empire will be decided in this one action,” observed Yoshitsugu Saitō, the general in charge of the outpost.
The landings were like a mini-D-Day
Just as the Allied invasion fleet was steaming into the English Channel bound for Normandy, a hemisphere away, another armada was departing Pearl Harbor for Saipan. It would arrive at its objective the following week on June, 13.
The landings were preceded by an intense two-day artillery bombardment aimed at reducing the island’s defences. A total of 15 battleships and an assortment of cruisers and destroyers took part in the barrage. As many as 165,000 shells rained down on Saipan at an average rate of nearly 3,500 an hour — that’s an average of one every second for 48 hours straight.
The assault began at dawn on June 15 when more than 8,000 Marines from the 2nd and 4th divisions were put ashore in less than two hours. Casualties were heavy, particularly among the first wave. The Japanese, having already pre-sighted the landing areas with their heavy guns, were able to knock out at least 20 amphibious armoured vehicles in the opening minutes.
By dusk, the Marines had secured a six-mile-long stretch of beach and had pushed a half-mile inland. In the process, they had sustained 2,000 casualties. Over the coming days, more than 70,000 U.S. troops would be landed on Saipan, outnumbering the Japanese forces there by two-to-one.
The invaders faced dogged resistance
With fresh U.S. troops pouring onto Saipan through the beach heads, Japanese commanders withdrew their forces into the island’s rugged, jungle interior to continue the fight. The GIs and Marines ordered to secure the island soon christened the enemy’s defences with nicknames that confirmed the difficulty of the task — “Purple Heart Ridge,” “Death Valley” and “Hell’s Pocket.”
The fighting was bloody and close-quarters, with Americans using grenades, flamethrowers and gelignite to clear out caves and bunkers. The Japanese responded with bayonet charges.
Adding to the mayhem was the island’s sizeable civilian population, which had not been evacuated by Tokyo prior to the American landings. Casualties among non-combatants reached into the thousands as innocents found themselves literally in the cross-fire of the two armies.
The campaign was marked by in-fighting between GIs and Leathernecks
Further complicating the battle was a growing rivalry between the Marines and U.S. Army commanders. Tensions between the two branches reached a boiling point days into the operation when Marine General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith publicly lambasted and then sacked the head of the 27th Infantry for taking too long to secure enemy-held positions.
The decision surprised nearly everyone and was seen as especially unfair to the army division’s major general, Ralph C. Smith. Holland Smith reportedly hadn’t taken into account the ruggedness of the landscape, the stiff resistance by the Japanese and the mounting casualties when he fired his subordinate. Ironically, Ralph Smith’s own plan was used by his successor to finally secure the objective days later.
The battle ended with the largest bayonet charge of the Pacific War
With Saipan’s beleaguered defenders driven back to the island’s northernmost tip, General Saitō ordered what remained of his army to mount a massed banzai charge on the American lines.
At dawn on July 7, more than 3,000 able-bodied Japanese soldiers, along with several hundred of the walking wounded, hurled themselves at the invaders. They were joined by civilians armed with sharpened bamboo sticks. It was the largest bayonet charge of the Pacific War. The attacks, which continued for 15 hours, killed more than 650 Americans. Japanese casualties were extreme — an estimated 4,000 dead.
Three Americans were awarded posthumous Medals of Honor for repelling the relentless assaults.
After that, only small pockets of resistance remained; the Battle of Saipan was effectively over.
Saipan’s civilians killed themselves by the thousands
Tragically, the losses didn’t end with the Japanese bayonet charge. With Saipan in U.S. hands, propaganda broadcasts from Tokyo urged the remaining residents to take their own lives rather than suffer the humiliation of American occupation.
For four days beginning on July 8, several thousand Japanese men, women and children gathered on the northern tip of Saipan near Marpi Point and threw themselves from the towering heights. Not even desperate pleas to stop — broadcast on U.S. loudspeakers by those who had turned themselves over to the Americans — could end the madness. The 800-foot outcropping from which many leapt was later dubbed Suicide Cliff. Marines and GIs reportedly found hundreds of bodies piled below. Others plunged from Banzai Cliff, a 100-foot rock face overlooking the churning Pacific.
The mass suicides served as a chilling demonstration to many Americans of the resistance that could be expected in any future invasion of the Japanese homeland. The sites have since been declared landmarks and attract mourners from across Japan to this day.
It was one of the costliest campaigns of the Pacific
The United States paid dearly for Saipan. Out of a total of 70,000 soldiers and Marines who fought on the island, nearly 14,000 (or one-in-five) became casualties. Of that number, more than 3,400 were killed in action. Japanese losses were far worse. Of 32,000 defenders stationed on Saipan, 5,000 were wounded in action, while a staggering 24,000 perished. An estimated 22,000 Japanese civilians also died during the three-week battle; 7,000 of whom took their own lives.
The loss of Saipan doomed Japan
The American capture of Saipan was a hammer-blow from which wartime Japan would never recover. Runways on the island, and those on neighbouring Tinian, would soon provide bases from which B-29s could hit Tokyo.
And then there was the crippling losses inflicted on an Imperial Navy carrier task force dispatched to relieve Saipan after the U.S. invasion. The epic showdown would become known as the Battle of the Philippine Sea or the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. With the destruction of three of Japan’s precious few remaining flattops and more than 600 aircraft, the sea lanes leading to the home islands were effectively thrown open to America’s Pacific Fleet.
The scope of this two-fold calamity rocked Japan to its core when the it was finally revealed. The debacles prompted the resignation of prime minister Hideki Tojo. Even worse, the events laid bare the fiction that propagandists in Tokyo had been pushing since the war began: that the superior resilience and courage of the Japanese fighting man would ensure final victory.
According to British historian H.P. Willmott, by July of 1944 “even the most hard-headed of the Japanese militarists could dimly perceive that Japan would be at the end of her tether.”
Holdouts continued to fight on for months
Even with major combat operations ended on Saipan, small pockets of Japanese troops continued to resist the occupiers. For months after taking possession of the island, Marine patrols scoured the wooded and rocky interior looking for holdouts.
The most effective of these was a 30-year-old Japanese army captain named Sakae Oba who, along with nearly 50 soldiers and 200 civilians, evaded capture for more than 500 days, an impressive feat considering the relatively small size of Saipan. In fact, Oba and his followers wouldn’t finally turn themselves in until December of 1945 — more than three months after Tokyo’s unconditional surrender. A hero in Japan, his exploits were the subject of a 2011 film known as Oba: The Last Samurai and alternatively as The Miracle of the Pacific.
Saipan has become a draw for tourists
Since its capture 75 years ago, Saipan has been administered by the United States under the auspices of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Having initially been used as the site for a military base, during the 1990s, the island began expanding its tourism industry. Visitors today enjoy Saipan’s beaches, tropical birds and historic sites from the war years, while the cliffs continue to draw sizeable numbers of Japanese nationals. Details of all activities can be found on Marianas tourism department’s website.
Sources
https://history.army.mil/news/2014/140615a_saipan.html
https://www.nps.gov/articles/marianasbattle.htm
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19940614&slug=1915484
Your article fails to mention that the TT or Trust Territory ended in 1984 when the people of the Northern Mariana Islands voted to become Part of the USA. They became a US ‘Commonwealth’ in 1986. Similar to a Territory, except they control their own Customs and Immigration. Everyone born there are US Citizens.