US Marine discovers a near-dead baby in a cave in the jungle of Saipan island, 1944


US Marine discovers a near-dead baby in a cave in the jungle of Saipan island, 1944




1944. A US Marine cradles the barely living body of a tiny infant, who was found facedown in a cave in the jungle of Saipan island, where native islanders had been hiding to escape the fighting between US and Japanese forces.

Photo by W. Eugene Smith.

In a photo that somehow comprises both tenderness and horror, an American Marine cradles a near-dead infant pulled from under a rock while troops cleared Japanese fighters and civilians from caves on Saipan in the summer of 1944.

The child was the only person found alive among hundreds of corpses in one cave. The battle for the Pacific island of Saipan during World War II is one of those well-remembered battles between Japan and America, one made worse by the mass suicide of local Japanese civilians who jumped off cliffs, fearful of capture by the Americans.

The Americans declared Saipan “secure” on July 9, 1944, after a battle that obliterated the 30,000-strong Japanese garrison and killed up to 12,000 of the local Chamorro and Carolinian islanders and Japanese civilian settlers on the island (Japanese settlers worked the island’s sugar cane fields).

This is what has been called “war without mercy” – battles supercharged by racial stereotypes about the enemy. Japanese soldiers hid out in the thick shrub on the island long after the battle ended, refusing to give up and attacking US troops stationed on the island. One sizeable group led by Captain Oba only surrendered in December 1945 when the war was long over.

1,000 Japanese civilians committed suicide in the last days of the battle by fears such as American mutilation of Japanese war dead. Some Japanese people living beside the cliff jumped from places that were later named Suicide Cliff and Banzai Cliff.

These would become part of the National Historic Landmark District as Landing Beaches; Aslito/Isley Field; & Marpi Point, Saipan Island, designated in 1985. Today the sites are a memorial and Japanese people visit to console the victim’s souls.

(Photo credit: Eugene Smith).

We hope that you have enjoyed reading our blog on the world history and facts. If you enjoy this blog please let us know in the comments below. If you are interested in history, we recommend you check out our other blogs here on the world history and facts. Thank you for reading.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Death Of Tightrope Walker Karl Wallenda (video).

Image
The Death Of Tightrope Walker Karl Wallenda (video) . Karl Wallenda's final — and tragic — tightrope walk was caught on video in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He had been performing stunts since he was six years old. He was trained to walk on a high wire, cycle across a tightrope, and balance as one of a seven-man pyramid. Rarely was a safety net used. For him, it seemed, nothing was impossible. Then, on March 22, 1978, the world watched in horror as Karl Wallenda fell to his death. As he attempted to walk across a high wire strung between the two towers of the Condado Plaza Hotel, the 73-year-old Wallenda lost his balance, teetering on the wire for 30 heart-stopping seconds before plummeting 10 stories. Karl Wallenda had been performing stunts since he was six years old. He was trained to walk on a high wire, cycle across a tightrope, and balance as one of a seven-man pyramid. Rarely was a safety net used. For him, it seemed, nothing was impossible Then, on March 22, 1978, t
Read more

The capture of brave Russian officer Rosinski

Image
The capture of brave Russian officer Rosinski This is a shocking image and I apologize in advance for sharing it, but here’s one that truly got to me… in Belarus, 1918, after WWI had already ended, the brave Russian officer Rosinski was captured by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks tortured the captain, likely to get information out of the man, which he bravely refused to give. After that, they simply continued with the torture out of some sick sense of innate cruelty. He was ‘the enemy’ and he was at their mercy, so they brutally murdered their captive. The brave captain was emasculated. And anally impaled on a tree branch. All this while still alive. Alfred Savoir, the man who published the picture and was an eye witness to the death of the brave military officer, described "M. B.", who ordered this atrocity, thus: I knew him not long ago; he was a charming teenager with an ironic wit and joker. He was rubbed with French culture, he admired the novels of Barres and he quot
Read more

How The Sinking of The USS Indianapolis Became The Worst Shark Attack in History

Image
How The Sinking of The USS Indianapolis Became The Worst Shark Attack in History The tragic sinking of the USS Indianapolis The heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis was part of the U.S. Navy. It was named after the city of Indianapolis, Indiana. It was launched in 1931. At 00:15 on July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine after delivering parts of the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima. The ship sank in 12 minutes. About 300 of the ship's 1,195 crew members went down with it. The other 890 people were stuck in the open ocean with few lifeboats and almost no food or water. The Navy didn't find out for four days that the ship had sunk. Into The Pacific Theatre The USS Indianapolis, measuring 610 feet and three inches in length and displacing 9,950 tons of water when placed in the harbor, was launched in 1931 and commissioned by the Navy the following year. The United States joined World War II when Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor
Read more

Leonard Siffleet about to be beheaded with a sword by a Japanese soldier, 1943

Image
Leonard Siffleet about to be beheaded with a sword by a Japanese soldier, 1943...world history and facts. Leonard Siffleet was an Australian Special Forces radio operator, sent on a mission to Papua New Guinea to establish a coast watching station. In September 1943, his patrol was sent to Japanese-held New Guinea, to recon the Japanese forces stationed there. Siffleet and two other Australian soldiers were captured by local natives friendly to the Japanese and turned over to the Japanese. All three men were interrogated, tortured, and confined for approximately two weeks before being taken down to Aitape Beach on the afternoon of 24 October 1943. Bound and blindfolded, surrounded by Japanese and native onlookers, they were forced to the ground and executed by beheading, on the orders of Vice-Admiral Michiaki Kamada of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The officer who executed Siffleet, Yasuno Chikao, detailed a private to photograph him in the act. At the end of the war, Ch
Read more

Facing the Death: the different expressions of six Polish civilians moments before death by firing squad, 1939

Image
Facing the Death: the different expressions of six Polish civilians moments before death by firing squad, 1939 It’s interesting to see the range of emotions displayed by these men: anguish, defiance, stoicism, acceptance, and fear, the third one from the left is even smiling. The execution took place during the Bloody Sunday in Bydgoszcz, Poland, 1939. Bloody Sunday was a series of killings of members of the German minority that took place at the beginning of World War II. On September 3, 1939, two days after the beginning of the German invasion of Poland, highly controversial killings occurred in and around Bydgoszcz (German: Bromberg), a Polish city with a sizable German minority. The number of casualties and other details of the incident are disputed among historians. The Nazis exploited the deaths as grounds for a massacre of Polish inhabitants after the Wehrmacht captured the town. In an act of retaliation for the killings on Bloody Sunday, a number of Polish civilians were execut
Read more

The Rwandan genocide

Image
The  Rwandan genocide The  Rwandan genocide  occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were killed by armed Hutu militias. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 662,000 Tutsi deaths. In 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group composed mostly of Tutsi refugees, invaded northern Rwanda from their base in Uganda, initiating the Rwandan Civil War. Over the course of the next three years, neither side was able to gain a decisive advantage. In an effort to bring the war to a peaceful end, the Rwandan government led by Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana[4] signed the Arusha Accords with the RPF on 4 August 1993. The catalyst became Habyarimana's assassination on 6 April 1994, creating a power vacuum and ending peace accords. Genocidal killings began the following day when majority Hutu s
Read more

“The experience I learned was that … if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed…

Image
Marina Abramovic. Rhythm 0. 1974  “The experience I learned was that … if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed… I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away.  It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.” -Marina Abramovic       The life threatening performance of Rhythm 0 featured Marina Abramovic, completely vulnerable to the will of her audience for six hours.  The participators were given an array (seventy-two) of items to utilize and do with as they please without any repercussions, such objects ranged from a polaroid camera to a gun and a single bullet.  Displaying the horrendous actions people were willing to inflict upon another just because they have been given the permission her constant focus on pushing the body’s physical and emotional li
Read more

Sara Janse Geldof - the last woman executed in Holland.

Image
Sara Janse Geldof - the last woman executed in Holland. The last woman executed in Holland, after being sentenced to death by a civilian court, was 33 year old Sara Janse Geldof, who was publicly strangled at Middelburg on Monday the 24th of September 1838.   Male criminals were hanged at this time but women were strangled at the stake for the sake of decency. The execution took place on a scaffold erected in front of the town hall. The Vlissingsche Courant of the 25th of September 1838 reported: "In the afternoon of September 24, 1838, Middelburg had the awesome ceremony of the execution of the sentence, passed on Sara Janse Geldhof, housewife of Pieter Johannes Huissoon, by the Court of Assise.  She was condemned to death, by strangling at the pole. Everything was completed in the best order, and a deep silence prevailed in execution. The convicted person behaved very well.” Sara had killed thirteen year old Catherina Block in March 1838 to rob her of the golden finery on her
Read more

Hannah Halley - for infanticide.

Image
Hannah Halley - for infanticide.  Hannah Halley like so many young women at the time found herself in a seemingly impossible situation.  She murdered her new born infant because she could not keep her job and nurse a baby and without the job she could not afford to support the child.   Thirty one year old Hannah worked at the Darley cotton mill in Derbyshire and gave birth to the baby on Tuesday, the 14th of August 1821 at her lodgings in Brook Street, Derby. Earlier that day her landlady and a friend of the landlady had noticed that Hannah looked very unwell and she agreed that she felt ill.  She went up to her room where she gave birth a little later and the two women heard the cries of a new born baby and went up to offer assistance.   When they entered the room Hannah denied that she had given birth and was seen putting a jug under the bed which she had previously been trying to conceal under her clothes.   Hannah continued with the denial so one of the women threatened to get the
Read more

The American POWs Still Waiting for an Apology From Japan 70 Years Later–world history and facts

Image
The American POWs Still Waiting for an Apology From Japan 70 Years Later Kathy Holcomb touching the wall of one of the original buildings at the Ishihara Sangyo plant where her father labored as a POW in World War II Kathy Holcomb put her hand on the wall of a crumbling factory building in the central Japanese city of Yokkaichi and envisioned her father touching the same spot during his years as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. Like thousands of American POWs, her father was made to labor under slave-like conditions in Japan’s war industry. Four of every 10 American prisoners died of starvation, illness or abuse. Now, the survivors, their families and supporters are demanding an apology from the companies that operated those camps and profited from POW labor. Those include some of Japan’s best-known corporate giants. “My father never really forgave the Japanese. He never understood the cruelty or the constant physical abuse,” said Holcomb. Her father, Harold V
Read more