Word: saipan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...marines on Saipan, the suicide of Japanese soldiers in the last days of the battle for the island, was an old story. But there were 20,000 civilians on the island, too, and many of them elected to die for the Emperor, or perhaps to escape a conqueror represented by Jap propaganda as hideously brutal. In this dispatch, TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod describes the gruesome deeds, incomprehensible to the occidental mind, which followed the U.S. victory...
...this time we had begun to hear a fantastic story that some of the 20,000 civilians on the island (of whom we had interned 10,000) were killing themselves. I headed for the northern tip of Saipan, a place called Marpi Point, where there is a long plateau on which the Japs had built a secondary airfield. At the edge of the plateau there is a sheer 200-ft. drop to jagged coral below; then the billowing sea. The morning I crossed the airfield and got to the edge of the cliff nine marines from a burial detail were...
...Saipan is the first invaded Jap territory populated with more than a handful of civilians. Do the suicides of Saipan mean that the whole Japanese race will choose death before surrender? Perhaps that is what the Japanese and their strange propagandists would like us to believe...
Death for 80,000,000? What did all this self-destruction mean? Did it mean that the Japanese on Saipan believed their own propaganda which told them that Americans are beasts and would murder them all? Many a Jap civilian did beg our people to put him to death immediately rather than to suffer the torture which he expected. But many who chose suicide could see other civilians who had surrendered walking unmolested in the internment camps. They could hear some of the surrendered plead with them by loudspeaker not to throw their lives away...
Probably it meant more administration work than field command for "Howlin' Mad" Smith. But he could take it. With Tarawa, Kwajalein, Eniwetok and Saipan behind him, he had commanded more amphibious assaults than any other U.S. general in World...