BATTLE NARRATIVE
I Remember The Screaming. Saipan: 9 July 1944
Yet possibly the most dramatic moment was to unfold….[1]
Dawn of D-plus-24 found the survivors of BLT 1-24 encamped near the Orange Beaches on the northwestern shore of Saipan. A bloody day lay behind them, and the detritus lay around them – shredded trees and shrubbery, freshly blasted craters, the smoldering remains of a farmhouse, and the bloating bodies of the dead. The gain of a few hundred yards came at the cost of eleven of their number (a twelfth would die after a month of suffering) and wounded nearly fifty others. For all that, however, they were hopeful. Rumors flew like shrapnel – the battle was over, the island secured, they were due for a rest and a quick return to Maui.
Shortly after sunrise, a long column of Marines came snaking up the road and halted by the beaches. The battalion regarded the newcomers “thankfully, and with some interest,” according to 1Lt. Frederic A. Stott. “They proved to be of the 2nd [Marines], having been on the march for two hours, and fulfilled our desires (but not theirs) by relieving us.”[2] One rumor proved true: BLT 1-24 was assigned to Division reserve, and could be reasonably well assured of a rest day. Tired but relieved, they gathered their gear and toiled back up the ridge crossed the previous day, returning to the foxholes they’d dug on the night of 7 July. Some headquarters personnel had stayed behind, and the area began to feel like a bivouac. Yet there were a distressing number of empty foxholes – mute reminders of buddies now gone, dead or wounded.
In their honor – and in celebration – the battalion broke out the booze. PFC Edward Curylo knew to be wary of sake. “Their banzai attacks were made from them drinking sake,” he remarked. “It’s a powerful, powerful drink!” Some officers and NCOs wanly tried to object, or warned “you’re liable to get sick or be poisoned.”[3] Many Marines were willing to take that chance. “I’ll tell you, sake and the Life Savers from our K-rations made a nice Tom Collins,” said PFC Norman M. Lucas of Charlie Company. “We proceeded to have a nice afternoon.”[4]
This relaxation lasted all of two hours. “Our relief status terminated abruptly,” said Stott, with orders to “move down to the east end of Marpi Airfield to reinforce the front.”[5] Much groaning and beating of gums ensued, especially among the revelers in Stott’s Charlie Company. Bottles were stashed and weapons retrieved with considerable fumbling and cursing. Marching did not help. “Northern airfield got a hot spot and we had to go in,” said Lucas. “It’s hot, the guys began to drop. ‘What are we gonna do with them, Captain?’ He says, ‘throw ’em in the truck.’ We had a Jap truck that helped carry some of our supplies. Into the truck they went.”[6]
At 1240, the battalion arrived on a stretch of level ground a few hundred yards south of Marpi Airfield, near Road Junction 123. To their left, imposing Mount Marpi rose eight hundred feet into the sky, dominating the plains around the airfield. The Marines were duly impressed: however tough their march had been, at least it hadn’t involved scaling down the sheer cliff or navigating through the jumble of sharp rocks below. They spread out, dug halfhearted foxholes, and watched as Charlie Company hauled its inebriates out of the truck and dumped them in a groaning pile.[7]
After so many long weeks of slow movement, the battle’s final throes appeared to be progressing rapidly. Every battalion wanted to “win” the “Marpi Point Marathon” and so “moved faster than reasonable caution would dictate,” according to historian Carl Hoffman.[8] At 1245 PFC James S. Nabors, a telephone lineman with BLT 1-25, strapped on his climbing spikes, scaled a telegraph pole near Marpi Airfield, and affixed an American flag to the crossbar.[9] Despite some accurate sniper fire from a few bypassed Japanese, the situation seemed to be well in hand and BLT 1-24 crossed the crushed coral strip without incident. “From Marpi Airport the land shelves off gradually to the point,” recalled Fred Stott. “Four hundred yards short of the point, the shelving is interrupted by a 30-foot cliff line. From the airfield to the cliff, the opposition was negligible…. The battalion remained atop the cliffs.”[10]
Fifteen minutes later, the Naval Gunfire Liaison officer attached to BLT 1-24 passed a message from his radio set. “Enemy troops are in the water at [TA 292].”[11]
The final drama – what Hoffman called “the crowning horror” of Saipan – was beginning.
“Water ran red with human blood."
The fleeing civilians and retreating Japanese troops had finally run of space and out of time.
For days or for weeks, they struggled to survive – evading American shelling, aircraft, and advancing infantry, scrounging for food, living on sugar cane and coconuts, desperately short of water. They were not yet ready to die so they hid in caves, moved at night, dragged their few possessions, carried the very old and the very young and the sick and the injured. They had not given up hope of rescue – evacuation by the Imperial Navy, salvation in the form of reinforcing divisions, or a secretive master maneuver by General Saitō. They feared falling into the hands of the Americans, believing the propaganda leaflets that painted the Marines as mother-killing psychopaths, sadists, rapists, and worse; actual demons summoned to bring Hell to their homes. “The Americans would do terrible things to us if we were captured,” said one. “We thought of killing ourselves.”[12]
The American advance was terrifying. Farmsteads and villages and cane fields burned. Massive shells screamed from the sky without warning. Friends and family members died, or disappeared in to captivity never to be heard from again. Saitō’s massive gyokusai shattered the jewel of a thousand lives without apparent effect. So they kept moving north, painful bit by bit until they reached the cliffs. Some fled along the ridges to the peak of Mount Marpi, while others kept to the flat land along the coast and wound up at Marpi Point where the breakers boomed against the rocks some sixty feet below.
Caught between the devils and the deep blue sea, the inevitable choice was forced upon them. Go over to the Americans, or go over the edge.
From his perch atop the last cliff but one on Marpi Point, Fred Stott watched as a neighboring unit swept eastward along the low ground below. Civilians and soldiers popped out of hiding places; a few raised their hands or collapsed in sobbing submission, but many more ran in terror out to the rocks at the extreme northern tip of the island. Some Japanese troops offered to resist, but “it was a shooting gallery at 400 yards as our best marksmen sighted in on designated targets,” Stott said. “Such targets were invariably military personnel, and the shooting ceased whenever the military and civilians intermingled.” As the Marines picked off anyone in uniform, Japanese soldiers started circulating through the cluster of civilians.[13] Some were seeking a few more moments of protection, but others were speaking in insistent tones and handing out small objects to family groups.
Jeeps mounted with PA systems appeared wherever large groups gathered. Interpreters read from prepared statements or explained as best they could – your situation is hopeless, you have fought honorably, put down your weapons and you will be treated well. Japanese prisoners and civilian internees took the microphone. The Americans are kind. Look, we are well clothed and fed. Our families and neighbors are safe at Camp Susupe. There is nothing to fear. The overtures were met with stony silence. “No movement followed,” said Stott, “although in response to questioning, hand waving indicated that the plea was heard and understood.”
Then, “almost imperceptibly,” Stott observed, “a psychological reaction seemed to emerge, and the people drew closer together into a compact mass. It was still predominantly civilian…. As they huddled closer, sounds of a weird singing chant carried up to us. Suddenly a waving flag of the Rising Sun was unfurled.”
The choice was made.
The exploding grenades cut up the mob into patches of dead, dying, and wounded, and for the first time we actually saw water that ran red with human blood.[14]
“That blue sea in no time at all became the red sea,” said Sergeant Mike Mervosh. “It was the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in my life. They brainwashed the civilians… the women would throw the babies off the cliff, and they’d jump right after the children. The Jap soldiers, some of them, would have to push off the civilians. It was a horrible sight. I didn’t care about the enemy [soldiers] of course; they fought on and blew themselves up. But I hated to see all those women and children going that way.”[15]
PFC Glenn Buzzard, a machine gunner in Mervosh’s platoon, also witnessed the murder of civilians. “The Japanese soldiers threw the native women and kids over the cliff and jumped over after them. We had loudspeakers set up trying to talk them out of it, but they would get down over that cliff. If they were still alive, a soldier would go right out over the reef, right into the water, and would swim around and drown them. So we tried to kill the soldiers who were doing the drowning.”[16]
To Corporal Oscar T. Hanson of Able Company, it appeared that “the troops and civilians who refused to surrender dressed in their finest clothes, held each other’s hands, danced around, and then leaped over the cliffs to their deaths on the rocks below.” He was aghast at the sight of mothers jumping with babies clutched in their arms. “Even if you placed so little value on your own life, what about your children?” he wondered. “Children are the hope of the future. How sad to have no hope that one child might grow into a responsible adult that would influence the world toward peace and not war.”[17] Marine sharpshooters began targeting parents who looked like they might throw children into the sea, but the suicides continued. “The Japanese soldiers would round up ten or fifteen, and I remember even seeing some young kids, young children in this group, and they’d all jump off the cliffs of this one point to their death,” said PFC Robert D. Price. His Able Company comrade PFC James W. Jackson had a more visceral memory. “I remember the kids screaming, and then the mothers screaming.”[18]
Sergeant Everett E. Schafer, a machine gunner in Curylo’s Baker Company, described the scene in a letter to his sister.
The ocean was red with blood, and the bodies were thick. The men that were pushing them off and went in later themselves, we shot in the water. Later a company of our men went down there and we sat there watching Jap soldiers in trenches blow themselves up. Plenty did that for they are really cracked. There were three who were left sitting – after the Marines were about twenty yards beyond them, the women got up, walked over to the beach, washed their faces and combed their hair, walked over to the edge, tied their hands together and stepped off. How about that? It's really too much for me.[21]
A third Baker Company Marine, Platoon Sergeant John L. Meeks, described the event to the Marine Corps Chevron:
Those in the other group watched from a distance. Then they started toward the cliff. Some jumped off, others kept walking until they got to the beach. We were particularly interested in the actions of three women. They talked for a few moments, and then after clasping hands they deliberately walked into the surf. They seemed to change their minds after the waves caught them, but they acted a bit too late as the last we saw of them they were being swept out to sea.
We also saw some women with children strapped to their backs wade into the water and drown themselves.[22]
The total number of civilians who perished in this “orgy of self-destruction” will never be known. Today, monuments to their memory stand at “Banzai Cliff” against the sea and atop Mount Marpi at “Suicide Cliff.” Flocks of white birds nest in the caves and crevices and float serenely on the breeze, completing a picture perfect tableau. None lived on Marpi before the war; local legend maintains that each bird is the soul of a suicide, forever bound to the place where they died.
USMC photo by Sgt. R. B. Opper.
“Officially secured."
On military maps, the northern cliffs of Saipan were denoted as the O-9 Line – and in military terms, their seizure meant the final objective was complete and the battle was over.
“By 1615, all three regiments had reported they were in possession of O-9,” wrote Carl Hoffman. “And as the Marines looked north, all that they could see was water. There was no objective O-10. In the same minute… Admiral Turner, the Expeditionary Force Commander, declared the island secured.”[26]Headquarters ordered a ceremony at Charan Kanoa; there was much celebratory backslapping and handshaking, and “appropriate flag raisings and photographing of leading commanders.”
The Marines at Marpi raised their eyebrows at the news. “To the public, ‘officially secure’ marks the completion of conquest,” explained Fred Stott. “But to the infantry, it is meaningless. To us, securing would come when we boarded ship.”[27]
[1] Frederic A. Stott, “Saipan Under Fire” (Andover: Frederic Stott, 1945), 20
[2] Ibid. The relief unit was 2/2nd Marines, combat veterans coming off a few days of well-needed rest in Garapan.
[3] Edward Curylo, oral history interview conducted by Brian Louwers (4 December 2013), Edward Curylo Collection (AFC/2001/001/94115), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
[4] Norman M. Lucas Collection (AFC/2001/001/30436), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
[5] Stott, 20.
[6] Lucas interview. He is likely referring to (then First Lieutenant) Stott, the acting company commander.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Carl W. Hoffman, Saipan: The Beginning of the End (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Historical Division US Marine Corps, 1950), 243. “Many enemy groups were bypassed with the result that much time and effort were spent extricating holed-up Japanese after 9 July.”
[9] “Action Report: First Battalion, 24th Marines Record of Events, 15 June – 9 July 1944″ (24 August 1944). Hereafter BLT 1-24 Report.
[10] Stott, 20.
[11] BLT 1-24 Report.
[12] David Sablan in Bruce M. Petty, Saipan: Oral Histories of the Pacific War (McFarland & Company: Jefferson, NC, 2002), 43.
[13] Stott, 20.
[14] Stott, 21.
[15] Mike Mervosh, oral history interview conducted by The National World War II Museum, “Oral History Part 1,” March 19, 2008.
[16] Glenn Buzzard in Gail Chatfield, By Dammit, We’re Marines! (San Diego: Methvin Publishing, 2008), 63.
[17] Oscar T. Hanson, A Survivor, Not A Hero: World War II “The Hell Of War,” (Madison, GA: Oscar Hanson, 2003), 31.
[18] Alexander Astroth, Mass Suicides on Saipan and Tinian, 1944: An Examination of the Civilian Deaths in Historical Context (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019), 90.
[19] Stott, 21
[20] Curylo interview.
[21] Everett E. Schafer, personal letter to LaFerhn and Henry Kolling, 19 July 1944. Courtesy Gary Schafer.
[22] “Japanese Saipan Civilians Refuse Surrender Plea, Commit Suicide,” Marine Corps Chevron Vol. III No. 36, 9 September 1944. The scene with the three women was also seen and reported by correspondent Robert Sherrod in his book On To Westward.
[23] Carl W. Proehl, ed. The Fourth Marine Division in World War II (Washington: Infantry Journal Press, 1946), 68.
[24] Robert Sherrod, On To Westward: War in the Central Pacific (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1945), 146-147.
[25] Stott, 21.
[26] Hoffman, 243.
[27] Stott, 21.
Battalion Daily Report
Casualties, Evacuations, Joinings & Transfers
KIA/DOW
WIA & EVAC*
SICK
JOINED
TRANSFERRED
STRENGTH
Out of an original landing strength of XXX officers and men.
* Does not include minor wounds not requiring evacuation from the line.
| Name | Company | Rank | Role | Change | Cause | Disposition |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bigleman, William Hayman | Headquarters | PFC | Radioman | Sick | Unknown | Evacuated, destination unknown |
| Boyd, Kenneth Newman | Baker | PFC | Rifleman | Returned To Duty | From hospital | To Baker Company |
| Brengle, Alfred Joseph | Charlie | Platoon Sergeant | MG NCO | Returned To Duty | From hospital | To Charlie Company |
| Cowan, Joseph Bradley | Charlie | Sergeant | Squad Leader | Returned To Duty | From hospital | To Charlie Company |
| DeCelles, Charles Calvin | Baker | PFC | BARman | Returned To Duty | From hospital | To Baker Company |
| Gum, Charles Bush Jr. | Baker | PFC | Ammo Carrier | Wounded In Action | Unknown (slight) | Evacuated, destination unknown |
| Lamberson, Floyd William | Charlie | PFC | Rifleman | Returned To Duty | From hospital | To Charlie Company |
| Mason, Clyde Florn Jr. | Able | PFC | Rifleman | Wounded In Action | Grenade shrapnel, right arm & leg | Evacuated, destination unknown |
| Zaar, Carl Luther | Headquarters | PhM2c | Corpsman | Wounded In Action | Unknown (slight) | Not evacuated |
thank you for your service, all of you!