The Battle of Saipan

The Battle of Saipan

June 15, 1944 was a mini D-day in the pacific. The marines stormed the beaches of Saipan where they were eventually about to get a strategic victory that would be the launching point of the aircraft that was going to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. Because with this landing strip at Saipan they would be able to launch B-29 long range bombers directly onto the Japanese mainland. It could not be better stated the amount of casualties during this battle, “By the end of the day, some 20,000 troops had established a beachhead on Saipan; however, the U.S. had suffered approximately 2,000 casualties in the process.”(History.com)

One of the reasons that this battle was infamous, was the Banzai charge that happened in July 6th. After the battle had been looking worse and worse for the Japanese as supply ships were getting cut off and were not able to make it to the island to help the soldiers. As Japanese numbers kept falling, Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito ordered a Banzai Charge, which was a death charge where the healthy and the injured ran into the battle with nothing to lose except their honor. 27,000 Japanese men ran right into mortar and point blank Machine gun fire which destroyed the Japanese counter assault this day.

After this day of the Banzai Charge, the charged proved brutal for the US troops, that resulted in more than 3,000 U.S. deaths and over 13,000 wounded, but nothing close to the loss of the Japanese with 27,000 dead soldiers. One of the reasons that so many soldiers would rather die, than surrender was because the Japanese soldiers were fed propaganda that the Americans would torture and eat them if they surrendered. The loss of Saipan was the first defeat in Japanese sphere of control by invasion in 1941 and 1942. This was starting to look like the end of the Japanese Empire.

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/battle-of-saipan
http://www.historynet.com/battle-of-saipan
https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1770.html