The first Japanese soldier to emerge from a cave on Iwo Jima

The first Japanese soldier to emerge

from a cave on Iwo Jima, in which he and twenty of his comrades had been hiding for several days. The Japanese are surprised that they are treated normally. The commanders told the soldiers that if they surrendered, the Americans would torture them. 1945

D-Day for Saipan was June 15, 1944. Twenty thousand Marines made it to shore by nightfall. U.S. forces had come to understand that the enemy they faced did not believe in surrender. Two days before the battle ended on July 9, in one of the Pacific war's most horrifying suicide charges, 3,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors attacked the U.S. Army's 27th Division using whatever weapons they had left -- grenades, rifles, mortars and even rocks, swords and rusty bayonets attached to bamboo sticks. The Japanese preference for suicide over capture had been repeated throughout the war in the Pacific. But it was civilian suicides that would forever mark the memories of American troops on Saipan.

The civilian population on Saipan numbered close to 30,000. Twenty-two thousand were Japanese -- though most came from the prefecture of Okinawa and were ethnically distinct from other Japanese. The rest consisted of Korean slave laborers and the original inhabitants of the island -- the Carolinians and the Chamorro. As the battle of Saipan reached its final days, Japanese soldiers and panicked civilians made their way north to Marpi Point. Here, despite repeated calls by the U.S. military to surrender, civilians chose death by jumping off cliffs or drowning themselves in the sea. They had been led to believe that surrender would mean murder, rape and torture at the hands of U.S. forces.