On June 14, 1944, Taruo Kawacuchi, one of the defenders of Saipan, wrote in his diary: "The enemy has landed and the time has come at last. An impressive ceremony for our country was carried out at the Saipan Shrine."
Thereafter, as the merciless U.S. advance continued, Kawacuchi, a corpsman in a division hospital, made daily entries in his diary. He recorded, as well as it has been done anywhere, the strange mixture of animal courage and fatalism which motivates the U.S. enemy in the Pacific. This week, as a still greater Jap...
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