THE GUAM MASSACRE 1944: 18,000 Japanese Dead in 21 Days

It was not a counterattack. It was the end of the Japanese capacity to defend Guam, executed in a single night against a line that did not break. Here is the detail that the official timeline tends to emit. The invasion of Guam was originally scheduled for June 18th, 1944, 3 days after Saipan. When Admiral Spruent detected Ozawa’s fleet approaching on June 15th and cancelled the Guam landing to concentrate his force for the naval engagement, the invasion was postponed.

 The Battle of the Philippine Sea ran on June 19th and 20th and destroyed Japanese carrier aviation as an offensive force, but the ground divisions designated as Guam’s invasion reserve had been committed to the harder than expected fighting on Saipan. The 77th Infantry Division had to be brought forward from Hawaii. The wait was 6 weeks.

 The garrison of Guam spent those 6 weeks under sustained bombardment, absorbing the longest pre-invasion naval bombardment of any Pacific Island campaign, and using it to reinforce the positions that were surviving the shells. The battle that was made possible by the Turkey Shootute was made more expensive by the Turkey Shoots consequences.

 the western coast of Guam. 8:28 in the morning of July 21st. The Third Marine Division approaching Asan Beach, 1 minute ahead of schedule, while Japanese artillery pre-registered on the reef approaches opened fire on the amphibious tractors before they reached the beach. 20 LVTs sank in the water. The Marines who reached the shore came under direct fire from gun positions in the coral cliffs of Chonito Ridge and Bontel Ridge above the landing zone.

 positions that 37 days of naval bombardment had not silenced. 5 miles to the south, the first provisional marine brigade landing at Agat beach simultaneously, taking heavier casualties in the approach. The 77th Infantry Division wading from the reef edge to the shore in full combat equipment across hundreds of yards of open water under fire.

 Nimttz transferred Pacific Fleet headquarters to Guam in January of 1945. The harbor at Appa became the primary concentration point for the offensive against Japan’s home islands. The airfields became B-29 bases. The operational decisions that ended the Pacific War were planned and coordinated from Guam as much as from anywhere.

 The island the Japanese had taken in 3 hours in December of 1941 became the nerve center that finished the war. I spent 8 hours writing, editing, and researching this story to verify every number and every decision exactly right. Because the Battle of Guam is the only engagement in the Pacific War in which American forces were retaking American territory from an occupying power.

Because the Chammoro people of Guam were American citizens who had been waiting for 32 months. If this story matters to you, subscribe to the channel. Just subscribe. That is all. Thank you. Guam had been American territory since the SpanishAmerican War of 1898. It was the largest and southernmost island of the Marana’s chain, 30 mi long and 9 mi wide at its broadest with a protected harbor at Appa that was the finest natural anchorage in the Western Pacific.

 The island’s civilian population, the Chamorro people, indigenous to the Maranas and resident on Guam for thousands of years before European contact, had been American nationals since the treaty that ended the Spanishamean War. They were not a garrison. They were not a strategic asset.

 They were people who lived on an island that occupied a position the Japanese military needed. And when the Japanese military took it, the Chammoro people became the occupied population of an imperial military zone. Japan took Guam on December 10th, 1941, 2 days after Pearl Harbor. 3 hours of fighting against a garrison that American pre-war planning had kept deliberately small on the calculation that the island could not be defended against a determined Japanese assault and that investing in its defense would be wasteful.

 The island fell as calculated. The American Naval Administration that had governed Guam since the SpanishAmerican War, departed with whatever personnel could be evacuated. The Chammoro population, American nationals, without the means or the invitation to leave, remained. The occupation’s character became apparent within weeks.

 Japanese administrators renamed the island Omiaima, Great Shrine Island, and implemented the administrative structure that imperial occupation produced wherever it was applied. The Chamorro people were required to learn Japanese to bow to Japanese soldiers to participate in a civic framework that redefined them as subjects of the empire with no standing as anything else.

 forced labor for military construction projects, beatings for non-compliance, executions for resistance or the suspicion of resistance. The Catholic churches that were the centers of Chammoro community life were closed. The specific texture of the occupation accumulated across 32 months in ways that left marks on every Chammoro family on the island.

 Property confiscated for military use. Young men assigned to labor details on fortification projects. the systematic denial of the specific thing the Chammorro people had understood themselves to be since 1898. Americans. In the weeks before the American fleet appeared in June of 1944, the Japanese garrison herded the Chammoro civilian population into concentration camps on the pretext of protecting them from the coming battle.

The camps were crowded. They were undersupplied. The violence that attends a military garrison that understands its situation is ending moved through them with the specific quality of violence that has stopped calculating consequences. By the time American forces reached the camps, the Chamora people inside them had experienced what 32 months of occupation followed by confinement in deteriorating conditions produced.

Lieutenant General Takasha Teeshi commanded the Guam garrison with a force that was more substantial than any previous island command in the Maranas. Approximately 19,000 soldiers centered on the experienced 29th division that had been transferred from Manuria, supplemented by a tank force artillery in quantity and naval infantry.

 The defensive network he built across the western approaches of the island included bunkers, artillery imp placements with pre-registered fires on the approach routes, anti-tank obstacles, beach obstacles, and the cave and tunnel systems the Japanese defensive engineering had developed into the characteristic form of Pacific Island fortification.

 The pre-invasion bombardment had 6 weeks to work on those positions. 6 weeks was substantially longer than the preparation for any previous island assault in the central Pacific, a result of the postponement that followed the Turkey shoot. The positions had been built to survive bombardment. Many of them did, not because they were impervious to naval gunfire, but because the garrison had used the bombardment period to identify which positions were surviving and which were not, to relocate ammunition and artillery, to deepen tunnels, and to

adapt the defensive layout to what 37 days of sustained fire had revealed about which positions were viable. The garrison that waited on July 21st was not the garrison that had been in place on June 15th. It had absorbed the longest pre-invasion bombardment in Pacific war history and had improved its defenses during the bombardment by learning from it.

 This is the specific irony of the Turkey shoots consequences for Guam. The battle that destroyed Ozawa’s carrier aviation on June 19th and 20th had made the invasion of Guam possible and the delay it caused had made the invasion of Guam more expensive. On July 21st, two simultaneous landings began. The Third Marine Division came ashore north of Appa Harbor at Asan Beach at 8:28 in the morning, 1 minute ahead of the planned schedule.

 Japanese artillery that had been zeroed on the reef and the approach routes opened fire before the landing craft reached the shore. 20 LVTs were hit and sank in the water. The Marines who survived the approach came ashore under direct fire from Chonito Cliff and Bunttow Ridge. the elevated coral formations above the beach that the pre-invasion bombardment had struck repeatedly without silencing.

 The ridge positions looked down onto the beach at angles that made them extraordinarily effective for defensive fire and extraordinarily difficult to neutralize without infantry assault. By the end of the first day at Assan, the beach head was 4,000 yd wide and approximately 1 mile deep. The Marines had paid 105 dead, 536 wounded, and 56 missing for that ground.

 5 mi to the south at Agat Beach, the first provisional marine brigade’s landing was worse. Japanese artillery had been more precisely registered on the southern approach routes. The brigade took heavier casualties reaching the shore. The beach exits were more heavily defended. The 77th Infantry Division, arriving in the second wave without sufficient amphibious vehicles, waded from the reef edge to the shore in full combat equipment, several hundred yards of open water under fire, the specific ordeal that Tarawa had defined as the nightmare

of Pacific Island assault, and that every subsequent Pacific campaign had worked to mitigate. At Agat on July 21st, the mitigation was incomplete. The two beach heads were 5 mi apart and not connected. The Japanese still held Appa Harbor between them. The high ground above both landing zones was still contested.

 The battle was 4 days old before the beach heads were joined. 4 days during which the Japanese garrison pressed nightly counterattacks against both perimeters, attempting to keep the landings from consolidating before committing the mobile reserve, that doctrine designated for the decisive counterattack. Takasha watched the nightly assaults being absorbed without producing the breakthrough they required.

 The perimeters held, the beach heads consolidated, the artillery that had come ashore with the assault forces was being positioned and registered. The fire control networks connecting the ground forces to the naval guns offshore were operating. The specific tactical window in which a mass counterattack had its best chance of success the first hours after landing before the beach heads fire support was organized had passed.

On the night of July 25th to 26th, Takashina committed what remained. The channel will carry the complete account of what 3,500 men attacking simultaneously from multiple directions against a prepared marine perimeter looked like from both sides of the line. Why the attack that reached the beach and the supply areas behind the perimeter was still destroyed by morning.

 And what the Shamoro people who had been waiting 32 months did when the fighting passed their camps and their hiding places in the hills. Subscribe so you don’t miss it. The assault on the night of July 25th to 26th was the largest single Japanese offensive action of the Guam campaign and represented the commitment of essentially all the mobile offensive capability the garrison had remaining.

 Approximately 3,500 men drawn from every unit in the garrison that still had the organization and the equipment to conduct an assault attacked toward the junction between the third marine division sector and the first brigade sector. The choice of that junction was tactically sound. The seam between two units is typically the most difficult point in any defensive line to maintain coherent coverage, and a breakthrough there could split the American force and prevent the two beach heads from reinforcing each other.

Takasha accompanied the attack. Multiple columns crossed the open ground between the jungle edge and the marine perimeter. Some of them penetrated the American lines. Some of them reached the beach. Some of them got into the supply areas behind the forward positions. Japanese soldiers were found at dawn in positions well behind what had been the front line at midnight.

 All of them were dead by morning. The marine perimeter they attacked had spent the 4 days since the landing building exactly what it needed to survive this. Artillery in registered positions covering the likely approach routes. Machine guns placed for overlapping coverage of the open ground. naval fire control teams with the forward units who could call the offshore guns within minutes.

 The perimeter’s defenders had been expecting a large-scale night assault since the first day because every island before Guam had produced one and because the tactical situation made it inevitable when the smaller nightly counterattacks failed to break the line. When the Japanese columns crossed the open ground at 2 in the morning, they crossed ground that the defensive fires had been calculated for.

 The columns that penetrated the marine line were isolated by first light and reduced through the morning. The Japanese soldiers who reached the beach had crossed the entire American position, but had no force behind them and no means of exploitation. By dawn on July 26th, the ground between the jungle and the perimeter held the specific evidence of what 3,500 men attacking a prepared defensive line in the dark produces.

The garrison’s capacity for coordinated offensive action had ended. Takasha was killed 2 days later on July 28th, shot by machine gun fire while moving between positions. He had ordered the attack that cost the garrison its mobile reserve and had seen its failure. He did not survive to account for it. Lieutenant General Hideoshi Obata, commander of the 31st Army, whose headquarters was on Guam, assumed command of the remaining defenders.

 He inherited a garrison of perhaps 15,000 men, still armed, still capable of contesting ground, but no longer capable of the coordinated response that made a defense strategically coherent. What remained was a fighting withdrawal into the mountainous jungle interior of the island’s north, trading space for time, costing the advancing Americans whatever the terrain and the defenders stubbornness could extract until there was no more island to withdraw into.

 The Chamorro people were already moving. As the American advance pushed in land and north, Shamurro civilians who had survived 32 months of occupation emerged from the hills, from the jungle, from the concentration camps the garrison had established in the final weeks. They came toward the American lines, carrying whatever they had kept through two and a half years, helping children and elderly relatives, bringing information.

 They showed marine and army units paths through the jungle that the maps did not show. They reported Japanese positions. They guided patrols through terrain they knew in the specific way that people know the landscape where they were born. Every ravine and every ridge line and every trail through the plantation land that the military maps only approximated.

 They had been waiting for this for 32 months. When it came they were part of it. This was different from every other island in the Pacific campaign. not a strategic position seized from an enemy or a neutral population caught between armies. This was a population that was American, that had been American since before any of the Marines fighting for the island had been born, that had spent 32 months under occupation, waiting for the United States to return.

 The intelligence they provided was as accurate as intelligence gets because the people providing it had lived among the Japanese positions for the duration. The Marines and soldiers who received their guidance understood what it meant that the people helping them were Americans. The battle’s northern phase proceeded through August.

The organized Japanese resistance collapsed by August 10th when Obata signaled to the emperor from his headquarters at Mount Mataguak that his soldiers were continuing a desperate battle with only their bare hands, that the holding of Guam had become hopeless, and that he was overcome with sorrow for the families of his men.

 He asked the emperor to pray for the empire’s prosperity. Then he committed suicide. On August 10th, 1944, General Roy Gger declared Guam secure. The island that Japan had taken in 3 hours in December of 1941 had cost 18,337 Japanese soldiers and 21 days to lose. General Guyger’s declaration of the island secured on that date was accurate in the sense that organized resistance with a coherent command structure and the ability to conduct coordinated operations had ceased.

 It was not accurate in the sense that Japanese soldiers were no longer on the island, no longer armed, and no longer capable of killing Americans who moved through the terrain they had been defending. The northern mountains of Guam, the jungle interior that the retreating garrison had moved into during the final phase of the battle, contained thousands of men who had not surrendered and would not surrender.

 Some were organized into coherent units with officers still in command. Some were scattered individuals and small groups surviving on what the jungle provided. All of them were still there. The clearing operations that began after August 10th proceeded through the remainder of 1944 with a specific cost. American patrols hunting the holdouts through the cave systems and the dense vegetation of northern Guam suffered casualties into 1945.

By the time the war ended in August of 1945, more than 8,500 additional Japanese soldiers had been killed or captured on Guam since the battle’s official conclusion. The organized battle had lasted 21 days. The unorganized continuation lasted another year. The Chammoro people who had come out of the hills and the jungle and the concentration camps during the battle’s final phase were by August 10th in the process of returning to what remained of their communities.

 What remained was not much. 32 months of occupation followed by the battle itself had reduced the island’s civilian infrastructure to rubble and disrupted the agricultural and economic life that the pre-war community had sustained. The churches that had been closed were still closed. The property that had been confiscated was gone.

 The people who had been killed during the occupation were dead. But the Chammoro people were free. The island was American again. and the testimonies they gave to the American military officers who debriefed them in August and September of 1944 produced the documentary record of what 32 months of Japanese military occupation had cost a population of American citizens.

 What they described was systematic in the way that military occupations are systematic. The forced labor on fortification projects, men assigned to dig the positions that would be defended against the forces coming to liberate the island. the beatings administered for violations of rules that changed without notice.

 The executions conducted publicly in some cases as demonstrations of the garrison’s authority and privately in others when individuals were identified as resistant or suspected of contact with the outside, the specific cruelty of the final weeks, the concentration camps, the conditions that deteriorated as the garrison understood what was coming and no longer calculated consequences.

 The Chammoro people who survived were Americans. They were in the autumn of 1944 Americans who had been through something that American civilians in the continental United States had not been through and would not be through. And the distance between those two experiences was not fully crossable by the official vocabulary of liberation and victory.

 Subscribe to this channel right now because what the rest of this story covers, including why the counterattack that Takashina launched on the night of July 25th failed against a perimeter that was ready for it, the specific paradox of how the battle of the Philippine Sea both made the Guam invasion possible and made it more expensive.

 And the story of one Japanese soldier who spent 28 years in the Guam jungle after the war ended and what he said when he was found is the part that closes the account of what 32 months and 21 days actually produced on both sides. Do not miss it. December 10th, 1941. Japan takes Guam in 3 hours. The American garrison departs.

 The Chamorro population, American nationals, remains under occupation. December 1941 through June 1944, 32 months of Japanese occupation, forced labor, executions, suppression of Chammorro identity and language. The garrison builds defensive positions across the western coast. June 15th, 1944. Spruent detects Ozawa’s fleet approaching.

 The Guam invasion scheduled for June 18th is postponed. The fleet concentrates for the naval battle. June 19th and 20th, Battle of the Philippine Sea. Japanese carrier aviation destroyed. The fleet is free to return to the Maranas, but Guam’s invasion reserve, the 77th Infantry Division, is not yet in position. July 15th, the 77th arrives.

 The invasion can proceed. July 21st, 828. Third Marine Division lands at Assan Beach. 20 LVTs sunk in the approach. First Provisional Marine Brigade lands simultaneously at Agat Beach, 5 mi south. July 21st through 24th. The two beach heads fight in land, not yet connected. Nightly Japanese counterattacks. The Chammoro population begins emerging from hiding places and concentration camps toward the American lines.

 Night of July 25th to 26th. Takashina commits 3,500 men to the decisive counterattack. Multiple columns penetrate the marine perimeter, all destroyed by dawn. The garrison’s mobile reserve is gone. July 28th, Takashina killed by machine gunfire. Obata assumes command. August 2nd, the Japanese defensive line collapses in most sectors.

 The surviving garrison begins its withdrawal north. August 10th, General Guyer declares Guam secure. 18,337 Japanese dead, 1,744 Americans dead. August 11th, Obata signals the emperor that the battle is hopeless. He commits suicide. August through December 1944, clearing operations. More than 8,500 additional Japanese killed or captured.

American patrols suffer casualties in the northern jungle. January 1945. Nimttz transfers Pacific Fleet headquarters to Guam. Appra becomes the primary concentration point for the naval offensive against Japan. November 1944 through August 1945. B29s operating from the Marana’s bases strike the Japanese home islands.

 August 15th, 1945. Japan surrenders. Information of the surrender reaches most Japanese holdouts on Guam in the following weeks and months. 1964. The two soldiers hiding with Sergeant Shoi Yokoy in the jungle near Talopo Falls die in a flash flood. January 24th, 1972. Yokoy is found by hunters in the jungle. He is 56 years old.

 He has been there since 1944. 1997, Yokoy dies in Japan at age 82. The technical explanation for why Takasha’s counterattack on the night of July 25th to 26th was destroyed in a single night begins with what the Marine Beach head had built in the 4 days between landing and the attack. The Marine Corps by the summer of 1944 had developed a beach head defensive doctrine that prioritized fire support establishment above almost every other consideration after the initial landing.

 The first hours on a defended island were the most dangerous hours for the landing force. And the best insurance against a night assault was not additional infantry, but organized artillery with pre-registered fires on the routes a counterattack would have to use. Guns were landed with the early assault waves specifically for this purpose.

 Fire control networks connecting the ground forces to the naval guns offshore were established as a priority. The 4 days between landing and the night of July 25th had been sufficient for the third marine division and the first brigade to establish this capacity across both beach heads and across the ground between them. The approaches to the marine perimeter had been measured and registered before dark.

 The open ground between the jungle edge and the forward positions was covered by fires that had been calculated before the attack came. The 3,500 men of Tekashina’s reserve crossed that ground in columns. The columns that penetrated the marine line were cut off from the forces behind them by the fires that closed the gaps after penetration. The Japanese soldiers who reached the beach had crossed the entire American defensive position which was a genuine tactical accomplishment and found themselves surrounded by mourning with no means of exploitation and no force

coming behind them to use what they had gained. The specific reason the counterattack failed beyond the artillery and the naval guns was the completeness with which it committed the garrison’s offensive capacity to a single engagement. A counterattack that succeeds drives the attacker back to the water.

 A counterattack that fails and consumes the mobile reserve leaves the remaining defense without the ability to respond to pressure at any point along the line. Takasha’s reserve was the garrison’s capacity to move forces to threatened areas to seal penetrations to mount the local counterattacks that made a static defense viable.

 When the reserve was gone, the defense became a series of fixed positions that the Americans could approach from any direction without facing a coherent response. This is what the battle became after July 26th. The paradox at the center of the Guam operation is the relationship between the Turkey chute and the invasion it enabled.

 The Battle of the Philippine Sea on June 19th and 20th destroyed Japanese carrier aviation as an offensive force. This destruction was the precondition for the Guam invasion. Without eliminating Ozawa’s fleet and its air groupoups, the American ships in the waters around Guam would have faced a sustained air threat that the operation could not have absorbed.

 The Turkey shoot made the Guam landing possible. It also made it more expensive in a specific and direct way. The original invasion plan called for Guam to be assaulted on June 18th, 3 days after Saipan. The ground forces designated for Guam were in position and ready. When Spruent canled the Guam landing on June 15th to concentrate his fleet against Ozawa, those forces could not wait indefinitely.

 They were committed to Saipan, which was harder and longer than the planning had assumed. A fresh division, the 77th Infantry from Hawaii, had to be brought forward to replace the reserves consumed at Saipan. The 77th arrived on July 15th. Between June 15th and July 15th, the Japanese garrison of Guam spent 30 days under sustained naval and air bombardment. They used those 30 days.

They identified which positions were surviving the shells and which were not. They relocated ammunition to positions that were not being destroyed. They deepened tunnels and reinforced overhead cover. They moved artillery to positions that offered better protection. The garrison that waited on July 21st was better prepared than the garrison that had been in place on June 15th, specifically because the bombardment had given it 30 days to observe its own defenses under fire and improve them.

The battle that the Turkey shoot made possible was a harder battle because of the Turkey Shoots consequences. not harder in an abstract sense, but in the specific sense that the artillery positions above Assan Beach that sank 20 LVTs in the approach on the morning of July 21st had been improved and reinforced during the bombardment period.

 The caves on Chonito Ridge that could not be silenced by naval gunfire on the first day of the landing were stronger than they had been on June 15th. The Chammoro civilians in the concentration camps were in those camps in part because the garrison had used the additional time to implement security measures. It might not have implemented if the landing had come in June as planned.

 1,744 Americans died taking an island that might have been taken at lower cost in June. The difference is not calculable precisely. It is real. Sergeant Shoi Yokoy had been an army tailor before the war, not an infantry soldier or a combat specialist of any particular kind, but a man who cut and sewed military uniforms, and who came to Guam with the garrison in the general mobilization of men into positions that needed filling.

 He survived the battle in the jungle, hiding in the terrain of the island’s south, rather than withdrawing north with the main body of the retreating garrison. The American clearing operations of late 1944 did not find him. He found hiding places deep enough and remote enough to survive. He found food in the jungle, river shrimp, rats, the small animals that tropical jungle supports, edible plants, whatever the island provided to a man willing to eat it.

 He had companions initially, two other soldiers who had survived the battle and were hiding in the same terrain. The three of them built a concealed shelter near Talopo Falls in the southern part of the island and survived together through the final year of the war and beyond. In 1964, a flash flood filled the area near their shelter.

 Both of Yokoy’s companions died. He was alone from that point. The war had ended in August of 1945. Yokoy knew this. Information about the surrender had reached Guam through various channels in the months following the Japanese capitulation. American broadcasts, leaflets dropped from aircraft, the evidence visible in the transformation of the island into a major American military installation.

Most of the Japanese holdouts on Guam had surrendered or been captured in the years immediately following the war’s end. By the time of the last confirmed Preyokoy holdout sighting, most people assumed the island’s jungle was clear. Yokoy had learned that the war was over. He had chosen not to come out.

 He had internalized what the Japanese military code of the era taught about surrender. That it was not available to a Japanese soldier. That a man who surrendered had chosen a form of death worse than the other kind. That the obligation to the emperor and to the empire did not end because the strategic situation had changed.

 He understood that the war was lost. He stayed in the jungle because his understanding of his obligation had not changed with the war’s outcome. On January 24th, 1972, two hunters moving through the jungle near Talopo Falls encountered a man in the undergrowth. He was thin, wearing clothing woven from tree bark. He was 56 years old.

 He had been in that jungle since 1944. The war had been over for 26 years and 5 months. He was returned to Japan and received with the specific quality of attention that a story about extreme duration produces. He had maintained his military discipline for 28 years in a jungle after the war ended. He had eaten river shrimp and rats and whatever the island provided.

 He had made his own tools and his own clothing and had survived conditions that should not have sustained a person for that long. When he arrived in Japan, he told reporters he was ashamed to have come back alive, that returning at all felt like a failure of the obligation he had carried into the jungle. He had not been embarrassed to survive.

 He had been surviving methodically in the jungle of an island he had been sent to defend for 28 years. The Guam campaign had 1,744 Americans killed and approximately 6,000 wounded in 21 days. The Japanese garrison lost 18,337 killed and,250 captured in the same period, a survival rate for the garrison of approximately 7%.

 After August 10th, the clearing operations continued through the remainder of 1944 and into 1945, adding another 8,500 Japanese deaths to the total. And then for 27 more years, one man. The strategic significance of Guam’s capture was not fully visible until after the battle. Admiral Nimmitz transferred the Pacific Fleet headquarters from Pearl Harbor to Guam in January of 1945, 5 months after the island was secured.

The harbor at AppPa became the primary staging point for the fleet advance against the Japanese home islands. The airfields became bases for B-29 operations alongside those on Saipan and Tinian. The three islands together captured in the summer of 1944 became the platform from which the Pacific War’s final phase was prosecuted.

 The decisions about the atomic bombings were planned and coordinated from the Maranas as much as from anywhere else. The Anola Gay departed from Tinian’s Northfield on August 6th, 1945. But the operation it was executing had been planned in the command structure of which Guam was the center. The island that Japan had taken in three hours in December of 1941 became the nerve center from which the war was ended.

 Admiral Nimmitz writing after the war described the Maranas as a whole as perhaps the most consequential acquisition of the Pacific campaign. Not because of the battles that took them, he wrote, but because of what they made possible. Guam is American territory today. An unincorporated territory of the United States, home to approximately 160,000 people, predominantly Chammoro.

It hosts Naval Base Guam, Anderson Air Force Base, and the military infrastructure that has made it one of the most strategically significant positions in the Western Pacific for 80 years. The Chammoro people are American citizens as they were in December of 1941 when the Japanese arrived and as they were through the 32 months they waited for the Americans to return.

 The War in the Pacific National Historical Park preserves sites across the island related to the campaign. Assan Beach, where the Third Marine Division came ashore on July 21st, is accessible from the park unit that overlooks the landing zone. The reef is still there. The coral ridges above the beach where the Japanese artillery positions were built into the rock are still there.

 The positions themselves overgrown and weathered but visible. The water at the reef edge is clear. Shoi Yokoy returned to Japan in January of 1972 and lived there until 1997. He was 82 years old when he died. He had spent 28 years in the jungle of an island that the United States declared secure in August of 1944, and he had survived it, and he had apologized for surviving it, and he had lived for 25 more years in the country he had returned to.

 The distance between the official end of a war and what that war actually costs the men it touches is not a number. It cannot be calculated. It is the distance between August 10th, 1944 and January 24th, 1972, between 1,744 dead. And the moment when the last Japanese soldier on the island walked out of the jungle into the hands of the hunters who found him.

 32 months of occupation, 21 days of battle, 28 years in the jungle. That is what one island cost. Subscribe to this channel right now and turn on notifications. Because every week we bring you the stories that the history’s reduced to a casualty ratio and a date on a timeline without telling you that the island the Marines were retaking was American territory with American citizens who had been waiting 32 months.

 That the battle was made more expensive by the same naval victory that made it possible. or that one of the men defending the island was still there 28 years after the war ended living alone in the jungle eating river shrimp and rats because no one had been able to reach him and because his understanding of his obligation had not changed when the war was lost.

 Hit subscribe now then like. So this reaches more people who should know the name Shoi Yokoy and understand that the distance between the official end of a war and what a war actually costs is not always measured in years. Drop a comment below telling us where you are watching from. We will see you in the next one.