Because of their strategic location, the Marianas were a major American objective in 1944 during the island-hopping campaign of the U. S. Navy and U. S. Marines across the Central Pacific in the World War II Pacific theater. Once captured from the Japanese, the Marianas became an important staging point for air attacks on Japan.
The Marianas are a group of 15 Central Pacific Ocean islands stretching in a 500-mile curve midway between Japan and New Guinea. The four major islands, running north to south, are Saipan (the largest, at 14 miles long), Tinian, Rota, and Guam. The United States took control of Guam from Spain following the Spanish-American War in 1898 and subsequently used the island as a coaling station and naval base. Saipan, Tinian, and Rota had been under Japanese rule since World War I and had been fortified and made into significant military bases. On December 10, 1941, just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Imperial Japanese forces from Saipan overcame the small U. S. Marines garrison on Guam. Saipan subsequently became a major military administrative center and the Marianas as a whole served as a defensive cornerstone of the Japanese empire in the Central Pacific.
The American invasion of Saipan began on June 15, 1944, with an amphibious assault by Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner’s Fifth Amphibious Force of 530 warships and 127,000 troops under U. S. Marine Corps Major General Holland M. “Howling Mad” Smith. The Second and Fourth Marine Divisions, following reinforcement by the U. S. Army 27th Infantry Division, succeeded in overcoming the 32,000-man Japanese garrison after a month of heavy fighting on July 13. Only 2,000 members of the enemy garrison survived the assault, and 3,126 Americans were killed and 13,160 wounded. Shockingly, hundreds of Japanese civilians resident on Saipan committed suicide by jumping off the cliffs into the sea at Marpi Point because of fear of what their fate might be in American hands.
Neighboring Tinian was assaulted on July 25, 1944, by the Second and Fourth Marine Divisions and was declared secured on August 2 with U. S. losses of 389 killed and 1,816 wounded. Virtually none of the Japanese garrison of 9,000 survived. The final invasion, of Guam, began on July 21 and lasted until August 10. It was undertaken by the Third Marine Division, First Marine Brigade, and 77th U. S. Army Infantry Division against some 11,000 Japanese defenders, all but a handful of whom died or committed suicide rather than surrender. More than 1,400 Americans were killed on Guam, and a further 5,600 were wounded. Mopping-up and search operations against Japanese holdouts that had fled into the hills and jungles of the islands, especially on Guam, lasted well into the late 1940s. The last Japanese soldier on the island did not turn himself in to American authorities until the late 1970s.
Poster advertising U. S. Marines (Library of Congress)
The loss of the Marianas, combined with the stunning Japanese naval defeat in the Battle of the Philippine Sea of June 19 and 20, brought about the downfall of General Hideki Tojo as prime minister of the Japanese government and his retirement from public life. As expected, the Marianas played a major role in the subsequent American war effort. Strategically located some 1,200 miles south of Japan, Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, with their preexisting and rapidly improved airfields, proved vital for the American strategic air campaign against Japan. The first B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator bombers of U. S. Army Air Forces arrived on the islands in August, and were joined in October 1944 by B-29 Superfortresses of the Twenty-first Bomber Command capable of reaching Japan. On August 6 and 9, 1945, B-29s flying from Tinian dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Following World War II, in 1947, the United Nations designated the Mariana Islands as a trust territory of the United States. This relationship continued until 1978 when the people of the Marianas negotiated and signed a covenant with the United States, which granted the island’s inhabitants the right to form a self-governing commonwealth. Residents of the Mariana Islands have U. S. citizenship, but they are not represented in Congress and do not have the right to vote in presidential elections.
Further reading: Philip A. Crowl, Campaign in the Marianas (Washington, D. C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1960).
—Clayton D. Laurie
World History
