To the U.S. the cost of Saipan was high —2,359 killed, 1,213 missing, 11,481 wounded. But the military justification was high, too; in many ways, Saipan was the most important objective yet taken by U.S. troops in the drive across the Pacific. The Japs, who knew its value, gave it up hard. Their losses: 16,000 dead, 1,000 prisoners, countless others missing in the caves where they were buried by explosive and by bulldozers. In this dispatch from the battlefield, TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod tells of the Japs' last stand:
From the hillside shortly after noon we could see our tanks edging forward through the canefields only 500 yards away. They were firing thousands of rounds from their machine guns, occasionally blasting away with their 753. This was the beginning of our two-day recovery from the enemy's last crazy counterattack.
Once again, as I had seen them do on Attu and Tarawa, these strange little men had swept forward in a last hopeless, noisy, assault. The pattern was the same, only this time it was bigger. More than 3,000 of these mad, unreasoning, half-human creatures joined in it—the count may go as high as 5,000 by the time we have counted all their rotting bodies.
For their last charge the Japs smashed into a spot in our front line about five o'clock in the morning. They picked a place along the beach a couple of miles north of Garapan and for a while they may have thought they were getting somewhere as they swept forward, firing and screaming, waving swords, brandishing bayonets on rifles or tied to sticks, and grabbing up carbines from fallen Americans.
In the Cannon's Mouth. Along a strip inland from the beach they drove some 1,500 yards into our positions before they were stopped. They got all the way into an artillery battalion which had moved twelve 105s into position the night, before. There they were stopped, and there the most forward of them died.
The artillerymen fired pointblank into the Japs with fuses set at four-tenths of a second. They bounced their high explosive shells 50 yards in front of their guns and into the maniacal ranks. They manned their few machine guns and fired until the guns stopped from overheating. They fired their carbines until the ammunition was exhausted.
The Japs poured toward them. The gunners picked up Jap rifles and ammunition and turned them into the enemy. When the order came for the artillery to withdraw they sent this answer back: "Sir, we would prefer to stay and fight it out."
They did.
Old Story. This afternoon I went down the hill into the cane fields after the tanks and infantry. Along the west side of a little toy railroad there were dead Japanese every few feet. Some of them were blasted beyond recognition. Under a little farmhouse there were six Jap soldiers, all with their right hands missing, their chests blasted. The old story — suicide by hand grenade.