The final major battle occurred on the night of 6-7 July. The Japanese had been pushed into a small pocket in the northern most part of Saipan. General Smith cautioned that a "banzai" attack would likely occur this night, and he was right. The remaining Japanese units assembled at Mari Point, Paradise Valley and Harakiri Gulch. At 04:45 the bugles sounded, and about 3,000 Japanese armed with rifles, spears, or nothing charged, yelling as they came. The sheer numbers overwhelmed the American front. Finding a gap between the 1st and 2nd Army Battalions of the 105th Infantry, the enemy came down the valleys and onto the narrow coastal plain. The Japanese may have been disorganized, but Marine Major Hoffman remarked, 'Here was a determination which was seldom - if ever - matched by fighting men of any other country.' Army positions were forced back to their command post. The Marine units at Tanapag Village were forced into a pocket and had to be evacuated by AMTRAKs. But the American lines held; the Japanese had met their match.

                                                                                      fallen Japanese soldier and tank

The fighting was so intense that Army gunners had to move around the stacked dead to better their fields of fire. The enemy wave came to the artillery positions, which fired point blank into the Japanese masses with fuses set on 4/10 seconds. At the height of the attack, three howitzer battalions contributed an average of 44 rounds per minute for an hour to the killing field. When the musters were taken for the 1st and 2nd Army Battalions and the Marine Battalions, there were 406 American dead; most of these dead were in the Army sector. The body count in the combat areas was 4,311 enemy dead.

What was the appearance of this event from a barge at the beachhead? Early in the morning the sky was filled with star shells lighting the battlefield. In the distance was a continual rumble of artillery. Late in the morning the word was passed that a serious enemy attack had been foiled. Then the wounded on stretchers begun to pile-up on the pier for transportation to hospital ships. Those on the beach agreed with Admiral Spruance's assessment: 'There is no question our troops fought courageously in this action.'

A visit to the front on the second day after this attack revealed a few mental 'snap shots' of this carnage. The area resembled a gulch, perhaps the width of a football field. Here and there were piles of Japanese dead where they had fallen; every 10 to 20 feet were the dead in all kinds of hideous forms. Only the Japanese dead remained on the field. A careful inspection was gruesome. An impression might suffice; looking into a foxhole exposed an American helmet with a hole at one side, a packet, a rifle, some spent casings, and a small pocket bible half covered with dirt. It had been one hell of a fight.

Death seemed to have been everywhere. And there was that sweet, unusual smell of the dead. On the beach beside the road, a bulldozer dug a large trench into which these bodies were thrown. Someone said they were later taken home by their countrymen.

On July 9th, 1944*  Admiral Turner declared the island secure. Then the Americans went on to Tinian and Guam to take the rest of the Marianas islands. There were 2,949 Americans killed (including PFC, Joe Trentadue, born Feb/05/1921, died July/09/1944*, PFC, Plot: A 360, buried 01/11/1949) and 10,364 wounded. Of course, the Japanese fared much worse with some 24,000 dead from burial count, 3,612 missing, and 1,780 prisoners.

In the last days of the battle, General Saito ordered the banzai attack. In his bunker during the evening of July 6th, he drew blood with his sword, which is a Japanese custom for the defeated commander, and then, the adjutant shot the general. This same fate was dealt the hand of Admiral Nagumo nearby. The American fleet had hunted the admiral, who destroyed Pearl Harbor, and settled the score.

...  On August 6th a B-29, the Enola Gay, flew from the Tinian runway to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima causing 78, 000 deaths in seconds. The world would long remember this event. In the "cold war" which followed WWII, the world would never drop another one as they now tasted its massive destruction first-hand. Following this raid on the 9th, another B-29, Bock's Car, took off from Tinian with the second still larger atomic bomb, called Fat Man. Its target was Nagasaki and another 70,000 people died as the mushroom-shaped cloud rose twelve miles into the sky.

and an exerpt from "The Battle of Saipan - The Final Curtain" - David Moore, Cdr. USN (Ret.)