In June 1944, an armada of warships and landing craft is getting ready for D-Day. Thousands of American soldiers are about to attack a prepared enemy with formidable defenses. But this isn’t Normandy, this is the island of Saipan. And the bloody battle there will bring total war to the Pacific.
Chapters:
00:00 Why the US Landed on Saipan
01:46 American Plan for Saipan
03:38 Japanese Defenses on Saipan
05:08 Preparations for D-Day on Saipan
06:39 D-Day on Saipan
08:46 Marine Combat Shotguns on Saipan
14:48 Japanese Counterattack
16:30 D-Day Plus 3 on Saipan
17:01 Battle of the Philippine Sea
20:45 D-Day Plus 7-9 on Saipan
22:33 D-Day Plus 11-15 on Saipan
24:10 Japanese Banzai Charge on Saipan
26:46 Civilian Casualties on Saipan
27:57 End of the Battle of Saipan
28:48 Battles of Tinian and Guam
30:04 Epilogue
This happened within days of Normandy. Lots of casualties
ReplyDeleteBloody battle came to the Pacific in December 1941. (Not just Pearl Harbor.)
ReplyDeleteI was out there a few years ago. Japanese still go there to remember their fallen. Great when a group of young tourists come up on you in the jungle closed off to everyone while you’re working on an 8 inch HE we fired 75 years ago. Nice place, though! Great food. Eod1sg Ret
ReplyDeleteJapanese would come to the Philippines to commemorate their dead when I was stationed there at Clark AB. The big hill behind our barracks had big water tanks on top for the base's water pressure. Everything but the land for the tanks on top and the access road was off limits due to unexploded ordnance. There was a small shrine the Japanese built to remember the estimated 3,000 who died on, in, under, and around that hill. Several hundreds sealed in by explosives, or burned up with flamethrowers. There was another marker off base outside the Mabalacat Gate (Clark was a huge base with 10,000 active duty personnel, 20,000 dependents, and around 30,000 Filipino civilians who came on base to work every day). Mabalacat Field was an outlying aurfield of the Clark complex. It had been sugar cane fields before the war and returned to sugar cane afterwards. But the first Japanese kamikaze missions took off from there. Families couldn't really visit where their loved ones had died, but they could visit where they last walked on this earth.
DeleteThat is where Dr. Salomon died protecting a field hospital. Ed Love found him and pressed for a Medal of Honor for him, eventually succeeding. He wrote about it in "War Is a Private Affair."
ReplyDeleteThere are some good books about that battle.
ReplyDeleteMy wife's father was there. He made it but had a rough go of it once home. I never met the man as I met my wife later in life. He died a couple months before we got together. I'd liked to have known him.
ReplyDelete