Marpi Point: Saipan’s Final Act

Privates Alva Perry and Paul Scanelon needed a bath.  Badly.  Neither had taken one in four weeks, and as members of A Company, 24th Marines, they had been tasked with defeating the Japanese garrison on the island of Saipan.  And for the most part, that was done.  Now it was time to wash a month’s worth of goop and sweat and stink off their bodies.

As they arrived at the beaches below Marpi Point on the Saipan’s far northern tip on July 10, 1944, something rather curious happened.  Two elderly Japanese parents, a teen-aged girl, and a small child peeked out from behind a rock.  Signalling their thirst to the two would-be bathers, the Privates quickly handed over their canteens.  And that brought more Japanese civilians out of hiding.

With their canteens nearly empty and bath-time apparently on hold, Scanelon went in search of more and, returning with a pair of 5-gallon buckets.  Now a line was forming.  As Perry and Scanelon looked out to sea, they saw another, even stranger site.  Dozens of Japanese were walking out into the water.  Further and further they went.  These, unlike the staring Privates, sought not to clean themselves, but to kill themselves by drowning.

Those certainly weren’t the only ones.  Saipanese citizens paid dearly for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Many of them had been convinced by Japanese soldiers that “the white man” was a race of brutal, uncaring people that would slaughter them en masse once they surrendered.  And the poor civilians, most of whom had never encountered a person of non-Asian descent, simply bought the story.

And so they killed themselves.  In the final days of battle, scenes like what Perry and Scanelon witnessed were played out in front of Marines all over the northern part of Saipan, but mostly at the northernmost tip…Marpi Point.

It was there that sheer, 800-foot cliffs provided the most gruesome displays.  Entire families would line themselves up, with older children pushing the younger children, mothers then pushing the older children, and fathers pushing the mothers before following them to be shattered on the coral below.  Others, standing in groups, would detonate hand grenades among themselves.  More shot themselves, or had retreating soldiers shoot them.  Some were forced by Japanese officers to commit suicide, but many more did so on their own.

U.S. forces sat below Marpi Point in boats with loudspeakers and tried, mostly in vain, to stop the madness.  There was little anyone could do.  Thousands of civilians died in those final days…and more than 22,000 civilians were killed throughout the campaign.

Sadly, the Pacific War was filled with these kinds of incidents, and they intensified as the war progressed.  It seemed that every island had a “Marpi Point” or “Banzai Cliff” of some sort.

Recommended Reading:  Hell is Upon Us

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Cracking the Japanese Defense Line

Today marks the end of organized fighting on the island of Saipan.  Located in the central Pacific on the northern end of the Marianas Island chain, it was one of the larger islands in the chain, at about 55 square miles.  It was vital to U.S. forces because, at 1,400 miles from mainland Japan, it was within the flying range of America’s latest (and largest) bomber, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress.  And so, just nine days after the largest amphibious assault in history took place off the shores of Normandy, another massive assault took place as the Marines landed on Saipan.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Navy was looking, as they had been since early 1942, for a way to destroy the American fleet.  With a significant portion of the U.S. fleet committed to the Saipan landings, this was the opportunity they desired.  However, as we have already seen, the subsequent engagement in the Philippine Sea was a disaster for the Japanese, which not only terribly cripped their Navy, but guaranteed that Saipan would not be resupplied or reinforced.  It was only a matter of time.

On one hand, the Saipan garrison, comprising 31,000 Japanese soldiers, fought with great tenacity, almost to the last man against the 70,000+ U.S. troops trying to take the island.  On the other hand, their leaders used the forces at their disposal with utter foolishness, wasting thousands of lives in the fruitless slaughter of banzai charges.

And on July 9, 1944, resistance had ended to the degree that Admiral Raymond Spruance and General Holland Smith declared Saipan secure.  Of course, there would be small pockets of the enemy to mop up.  Indeed, one small group of soldiers under Captain Sakae Oba would hold out until December of 1945!!  But organized fighting was over.

Estimates vary depending on the source you read, but Army and Marine deaths exceeded 3,200 in the fighting, with more than 10,000 wounded.  More than 24,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in combat, about 5,000 more committed suicide, and fewer than 1,000 were taken prisoner.

And like some of the other island conflicts, the non-combatant citizens of Saipan suffered horribly.  Many grenaded themselves and their families, having been conditioned to believe that U.S. soldiers would subject them to unspeakable torture and death.  July 10th would see a mass suicide by hundreds of civilians who hurled themselves off the 800-foot cliffs at Marpi Point to the rocks below.

In U.S. hands, Saipan would serve as the primary launching pad for B-29 raids against mainland Japan as well as a staging area for the invasion of the Philippines.

Recommended Reading: D-Day in the Pacific – The Battle of Saipan – I’ve got a couple really good books about Saipan, and Goldberg’s was the first that I read.

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