Suicide Cliffs of Saipan: A Harbinger of Things to Come

Please be aware: The tragedy of Saipan includes descriptions of murder-suicide. The resolution of World War II cannot be properly understood without this information, but this content may be difficult for some individuals.

Saipan is about 100 miles north of Guam in the Marianas Island chain. It had been purchased from Spain by Germany in 1899, and then granted to Japan by the League of Nations after WWI when Japan was allied with the Allies. Thereafter, Japan colonized Saipan, and although there were Chamorros and Koreans there, 90 percent of the 30,000 civilians were Japanese by 1941.

Marching toward Japan’s capital, the U.S. decided Saipan must be taken first in the Marianas. The U.S. attacked Saipan before Guam because it had the best existing airfields and lay 100 miles closer to Japan’s primary islands. D-Day for Saipan was 15 June 1944. More than 60,000 Marines and soldiers from the V Amphibious Corps under USN Vice Admiral Kelly Turner and USMC Lt. General Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith (2nd and 4th Marine Divisions and the Army 27th Infantry Division) fought 30,000 Japanese on Saipan. The commanders felt they would defeat the enemy here quickly because they believed only 12,000-15,000 Japanese defended the island (as usual, Marine Corps higher-ups underestimated the size of the Japanese fighting force).

Saipan was the first Pacific battlefield where the Americans also encountered a large enemy civilian population, possibly as high as 27,000. This was problematic because the Japanese population was mixed in with IJA troops and about 3,350 Chamorros and Carolinians making the bombardment of targets somewhat restricted. A pamphlet given to the 2nd MarDiv cautioned:

“We must...be…sure that a civilian is fighting us or harming our installations before we shoot him. International law…demands that civilians who do not fight back ...must, whenever possible be taken alive and must not be injured or have their possessions taken from them except after a due trial by competent authority.”

Unlike the IJA’s penchant for indiscriminately attacking civilians, even the most hardened American infantryman had no wish to harm women and children.

By the end of the first week of July, the Marines had defeated most of the Japanese forces on Saipan, and had pushed the remaining units and most of the Japanese civilians to the north of the island around Mount Marpi. The enemy was now crowded around hundred-foot precipices that plummeted from a plateau surrounding Mount Marpi overlooking the ocean. This mountain was bolstered on almost all sides by imposing cliffs dotted with caves and the damage caused by shell blasts from U.S. warships. It was an onerous place for the Japanese to offer effective defense. Civilians moved north with retreating troops stopping at the shore with no place to escape, and, just like their soldiers, the civilians started killing themselves instead of allowing themselves to be taken prisoner by the Americans.

Many Marines did all they could to help civilians. As soon as the Marines ascertained that suicides were occurring at Marpi Point, they had interpreters on megaphones and loudspeakers tell them they would not hurt them. Scout planes dropped fliers notifying civilians of U.S. servicemen’s good intentions.

Marine Jim Reed witnessed a father throwing his children, wife and then himself off a cliff. After observing such ghastly scenes, Reed wanted to help. When he encountered some children and women, he gathered them up before they jumped. There were still more than 20,000 in the Japanese-controlled area on Saipan.

Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saitō, the Japanese garrison’s commander, had actually ordered civilians to commit suicide in the event of defeat. For years, Japan had fed its citizens the propaganda describing Americans wanting to cut the “testicles” off of Japanese and as “sadistic, redheaded, hairy monsters who committed unspeakable atrocities before putting all Nipponese, including women and infants, to the sword.” One document claimed Americans were “barbarous and execute all prisoners” and kill some “by cutting them up and crushing them with steam rollers.” Believing the propaganda, many civilians trapped at Marpi Point decided to kill themselves. Mothers threw their infants off cliffs and then jumped. A group of a hundred passed grenades out to everyone from young children to elderly adults; then they held the grenades next to their stomachs, pushed the pins and blew themselves up. Women, men, boys and girls slit each other’s wrists and bled out. Others took cyanide.

Later, a patrol boat’s commander said as he motored along the coast by the Marpi cliffs, his craft’s progress “was slow and tedious because of the hundreds of corpses floating in the water.” One of the dead was that of a nude woman who had killed herself while giving birth: “The baby’s head had entered the world but that was all of him.” There were piles of bodies floating in the surf and along the rock jetties, most of them dead, but many not and sickening, gut wrenching moans echoed throughout the wind and canyon walls as those still alive suffered from compound fractures, lacerations and internal bleeding.

As civilians stood at Marpi Point debating whether or not to jump, a Japanese sniper shot those reluctant to commit suicide. While two parents agonized over whether they should throw themselves and their small children over the cliff, the sniper killed the parents. This revealed his position to Marines nearby who zeroed in on him. Realizing his position had been given up, he defiantly walked out of his cave and “crumpled under a hundred American bullets.” In another cave, IJA soldiers hid with women and children. When some infants started crying and threatened to reveal their hideout, a sergeant said, “Kill them yourself or I’ll order my men to do it.” With that order, “several mothers killed their own children.”

Marine Gunnery Sergeant Keith A. Renstrom witnessed a family of seven near the lip of a cliff struggling with the compulsion whether to jump or not. The seven members consisted of a father, a mother clutching her young infant, a young boy and girl of about 5 years or 6 years of age as well as two elder siblings, both of whom appeared to be in their young teens, and both dressed in exquisite kimonos. The family stood together, their forms pronounced at the cliff’s edge with the seamless back drop of the ocean behind them. With their hair wildly whipping their faces, they stared up at the position of Renstrom and his Marines. Suddenly, with a flash of movement, the father reached out and snatched the tiny infant bundle from his wife’s protective arms and hurled the baby up into the air and over the jagged rock face. Renstrom watched as the child rolled down the face of the cliff until it was stopped near the bottom, where it got hung on the sharp coral edges by its blanket and clothing. As the baby dangled, still appearing to be moving its tiny arms and legs, the men glared in horror as the waves then came relentlessly to pummel its little body against the jagged wall. Its life seemed to ebb away from it on each crest of a whitecap. The Marines returned their attention back to the remaining family members in time to see the two eldest children solemnly bow to each other and, without hesitation, turn and throw themselves off the ledge. The father then grabbed the young son and attempted to throw him over the ledge, but the little boy, having just bore witness to the horrifying death of his siblings, fought against his father with all the fierce determination his small body could wage against the size of a determined adult. The father was able to disengage with the boy and then he heaved him over the cliff to his death. The Marines could hear the boy yelling and witnessed him fighting at the air, but gravity tore at him and brought him to a crunching thud when he hit the rocks below. Then the father swiftly and mechanically did the same with his little girl, throwing her mercilessly to her death. He then turned to his wife. High on the cliff with the shattered bodies of their children below, they began to argue. Running out of patience with his wife as she hesitated in the face of her own death, he leapt forward and shoved her over the jagged ledge to join her dead children. Taking in the scene of his family now below him, he turned to Renstrom and his Marines and yelled out “Banzai! Banzai!” and then followed this declaration up with his own jump. As the men watched his decent, much to their chagrin they saw that instead of falling directly onto the rocks below like the others, in a dark twist of comedic fate, he was instead caught and spared his intended show of Japanese stoicism and was cradled by the crest of an untimely wave. Failing his objective, he did not die instantly like his wife and the two elder children. The Marines stood transfixed, watching as the man writhed in pain bobbing along the surface of the turbulent breaking waves of the rocky ocean landing having only injured himself. Obviously in extreme agony, but clearly still alive, they watched as the current began carrying him further away out to sea. After a short internal debate, Renstrom raised his Tommy-gun (Thompson submachine gun) and fired three shots, all of them missing his intended bobbing target. Quietly, a Marine nearby, visibly impacted as they all were by the senseless and nauseating scene that had just played out in front of them spoke, “Gunny, let me take care of this.” Slowly, he raised his M1 rifle and shot the father in the head. As the blood rushed out of the father’s skull, his body slowly disappeared into the deep, blue sea. This was to become Renstrom's biggest regret, which followed him throughout his life. He had not recognized what these people were about to do to themselves and didn’t stop the pointless self-slaughter. The shock of what he was witnessing had paralyzed him.

Government-controlled news reports in Japan glorified this suicidal fanaticism. One newspaper extolled mothers who killed their children and themselves as the flowers of womanhood. “This was obviously crude propaganda, but to its underlying purpose was chilling to convince…civilians that they too were expected to fight to the bitter end to protect the homeland. The army had imposed its standard of no surrender onto the civilian population to legitimize the notion of death before dishonor and collective suicide for all Japanese.”

V Amphibious Corps reported after the campaign that 27,000 Japanese and Korean citizens lived on the island when Marines landed. After the conflict, only 9,091 Japanese and 1,158 Koreans were found. Approximately 16,751 residents killed themselves, were murdered by other Japanese or were caught in the battle’s maelstrom (62 percent). The surviving citizens were cared for in camps under American military control. As in many campaigns, almost all Japanese troops fought to the death.

The actions of Saipan’s civilians was a harbinger of things to come as the U.S. inched its way toward the heart of the Empire of the Sun. According to journalist Robert Sherrod, the Japanese civilians’ behavior and the Saipan garrison’s fight to the death had been glorified in Japan and “were intended to make the U.S. think it would be that way all across Japan.” Events on Saipan deeply troubled American leaders; they did not want to find out what 70 million Japanese civilians would do during an invasion of the mainland after witnessing what the thousands of Japanese civilians had just done to themselves on Saipan. However, rather than discouraging the Allies from advancing toward Japan as the Japanese leadership had hoped, the suicides provoked a very different consequence: the atomic bombs. 

For more about the War of the Pacific, see my book “Flamethrower”: https://www.amazon.com/Flamethrower-Recipient-Williams-Controversial-Holocaust/dp/1734534109/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=