World Battlefronts: THE NATURE OF THE ENEMY

To the marines on Saipan, the suicide of Japanese soldiers in the last days of the battle for the island, was an old story. But there were 20,000 civilians on the island, too, and many of them elected to die for the Emperor, or perhaps to escape a conqueror represented by Jap propaganda as hideously brutal. In this dispatch, TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod describes the gruesome deeds, incomprehensible to the occidental mind, which followed the U.S. victory:

We thought we had seen everything in the line of Jap military suicides by the time the last charge of the Japs had been beaten off. But we hadn’t. Here was something different. During mopping-up operations a detachment of marines on amphibious tractors saw seven Japanese off-shore on a coral reef and drove out to get them. As the amphtracks approached, six of the Japs knelt down on the reef. Then the seventh, apparently an officer, drew a sword and began methodically to hack at the necks of his men. Four heads had rolled into the sea before the marines closed in. Then the officer, sword in hand, charged the amphtracks. He and the remaining two Japs were mowed down.

By this time we had begun to hear a fantastic story that some of the 20,000 civilians on the island (of whom we had interned 10,000) were killing themselves. I headed for the northern tip of Saipan, a place called Marpi Point, where there is a long plateau on which the Japs had built a secondary airfield. At the edge of the plateau there is a sheer 200-ft. drop to jagged coral below; then the billowing sea. The morning I crossed the airfield and got to the edge of the cliff nine marines from a burial detail were working with ropes to pick up the bodies of two of our men, killed the previous day. I asked one of them about the stories I had heard.

“In the Most Routine Way.” “You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it,” he said. “Yesterday and the day before there were hundreds of Jap civilians—men, women, and children—up here on this cliff. In the most routine way, they would jump off the cliff, or climb down and wade into the sea. I saw a father throw his three children off, and then jump down himself. Those coral pockets down there under the cliff are full of Jap suicides.”

He paused and pointed. “Look,” he said, “there’s one getting ready to drown himself now.” Down below, a young Japanese, no more than 15, paced back & forth across the rocks. He swung his arms, as if getting ready to dive; then he sat down at the edge and let the water play over his feet. Finally he eased himself slowly into the water.

“There he goes,” the marine shouted.

A strong wave had washed up to the shore, and the boy floated out with it. At first, he lay on the water, face down, without moving. Then, apparently, a last, desperate instinct to live gripped him and he flailed his arms, thrashing the foam. It was too late. Just as suddenly, it was all over: the air-filled seat of his knee-length black trousers bobbed on the water for ten minutes. Then he disappeared.

Child in the Surf. Looking down, I counted the bodies of seven others who had killed themselves. One, a child of about five, clad in a ragged white shirt, floated stiffly in the surf.

I turned to go. “This is nothing,” the marine said. “Half a mile down, on the west side, you can see hundreds of them.”

Later on I checked up with the officer of a minesweeper which had been operating on the west side. He said: “Down there, the sea is so congested with floating bodies we can’t avoid running them down. There was one woman in khaki trousers and a white polka-dot blouse, with her black hair streaming in the water. I’m afraid every time. I see that kind of a blouse, I’ll think of that woman. There was another one, nude, who had drowned herself while giving birth to a baby. A small boy of four or five had drowned with his arm clenched around the neck of a soldier—the two bodies rocked crazily in the waves. Hundreds & hundreds of Jap bodies have floated up to our minesweeper.”

The Enforcer. Apparently the Jap soldier not only would go to any extreme to avoid surrender, but would also try to see that no civilian surrendered. At Marpi Point, the marines had tried to dislodge a Jap sniper from a cave in the cliff. For a Jap, he was an exceptional marksman; he had killed two marines (one at 700 yds.) and wounded a third. The marines used rifles, torpedoes and, finally, TNT in a 45-minute effort to force him out. Meantime the Jap had other business.

He had spotted a Japanese group—apparently father, mother and three children—out on the rocks, preparing to drown themselves, but evidently weakening in their decision. The Jap sniper took aim. He drilled the man from behind, dropping him into the sea. The second bullet hit the woman. She dragged herself about 30 ft. along the rocks. Then she floated out in a stain of blood. The sniper would have shot the children, but a Japanese woman ran across and carried them out of range. The sniper walked defiantly out of his cave, and crumpled under a hundred marine bullets.

Death with Ceremony. Some of the Jap civilians went through considerable ceremony before snuffing out their own lives. The marines said that some fathers had cut their children’s throats before tossing them over the cliff. Some strangled their children. In one instance marines watched in astonishment as three women sat on the rocks leisurely, deliberately combing their long black hair.* Finally they joined hands and walked slowly out into the sea.

But the most ceremonious, by all odds, were 100 Japs who were on the rocks below the Marpi Point cliff. All together, they suddenly bowed to marines watching from the cliff. Then they stripped off their clothes and bathed in the sea. Thus refreshed, they put on new clothes and spread a huge Jap flag on a smooth rock. Then the leader distributed hand grenades. One by one, as the pins were pulled, the Japs blew their insides out.

Some seemed to make a little game out of their dying—perhaps out of indecision, perhaps out of ignorance, or even some kind of lightheaded disrespect of the high seriousness of Japanese suicide. One day the marines observed a circle of about 50 Japanese, including several small children, gaily tossing hand grenades to each other—like baseball players warming up before a game. Suddenly six Japanese soldiers dashed from a cave, from which they had been sniping at marines. The soldiers posed arrogantly in front of the civilians, then blew themselves to kingdom come; thus shamed, the civilians did likewise.

Death for 80,000,000? What did all this self-destruction mean? Did it mean that the Japanese on Saipan believed their own propaganda which told them that Americans are beasts and would murder them all? Many a Jap civilian did beg our people to put him to death immediately rather than to suffer the torture which he expected. But many who chose suicide could see other civilians who had surrendered walking unmolested in the internment camps. They could hear some of the surrendered plead with them by loudspeaker not to throw their lives away.

The marines have come to expect almost anything in the way of self-destruction from Japanese soldiers. They have read the story, in Japanese newspapers, of the “dauntless courage of Captain Yamazaki”—in the seventh paragraph it is revealed that Captain Yamazaki’s courage consisted in destroying himself. But none were prepared for this epic self-slaughter among civilians. More than one U.S. fighting man was killed trying to rescue a Jap from his wanton suicide.

Saipan is the first invaded Jap territory populated with more than a handful of civilians. Do the suicides of Saipan mean that the whole Japanese race will choose death before surrender? Perhaps that is what the Japanese and their strange propagandists would like us to believe.

* The marines had obviously never heard that Leonidas and his Spartans did the same before their last stand at Thermopylae.