The Brutal But Forgotten Battle of Saipan
An important but mostly overlooked battle was fought in the Pacific during WWI
On 15 June 1944, under the code name ‘Operation Forager’, the battle to capture Saipan, an island in the Northern Mariana Islands, began in the Pacific. After three weeks of fierce and bloody fighting, during which more than 30,000 soldiers died on the Japanese side alone, the island fell to the American army.
The history
After the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles largely assigned the German colonial territories in Asia to Japan, which thus obtained control over, among others, the Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands. In the years that followed, Japan managed to gain more and more influence on the Asian mainland, partly through a far-reaching territorial expansion policy. The Shenyang incident, for example, in which a Japanese railway line was blown up, led to the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the proclamation of the Japanese vassal state Manchukuo.
The annexation of Manchuria was not enough, because in the late summer of 1937 Japan invaded the Chinese province of Rehe and quickly conquered a large part of eastern China. Only when sometime later the (then Chinese) capital Nanking was also taken and the Japanese army massacred hundreds of…
