Photo of the Day

the baby boy

Today, a black-and-white photo of a young Marine in Saipan.¹

He stands on the side of a hill, holding a naked baby.

It is a boy, maybe six months old.

Dark places freckle the baby’s thigh, abdomen, shoulder, face.

And the baby is still.

Another Marine stands below, knees bent, holding a rifle.

He has stopped and looks at them with a cigarette in his lips.

This was the war against Japan.

Marines on Saipan’s ‘Red Beach’ at 1:00 pm on June 15, 1944, the first day of the Allied assault.

A few days after Americans stormed the Omaha and Utah beaches of France, other Americans stormed the beaches of the Japanese island of Saipan.

Marines move inland on June 16, 1944, the second day of the Saipan assault.

It was close to the Japanese mainland.

Capturing Saipan’s large airfield would put America’s B-29 bombers within range of Tokyo.

Marine tank uses a flamethrower to incinerate a Japanese pillbox, Saipan, June 1944.

The island was home to thousands of Japanese civilians.

Most were sugar cane farmers.

Many of them fought to the death alongside their army.

There were banzai assaults.

Close-in combat.

Many Japanese committed suicide rather than surrender to the Marines.

Marines advance through Garapan, the largest village on Saipan, July 3, 1944.

Saipan fell to the Americans by early July 1944 at a cost of five thousand dead and twenty-one thousand wounded.

Battle survivors were left with unspeakable memories.

A Marine persuades a Japanese woman and her children to leave the cave where they had been sheltering, June 21, 1944.

In the coming days, we will be bombarded with images of Omaha Beach on D-Day, when young Americans braved German machine gun fire eighty years ago to secure a foothold in occupied France.

We will be told of the choppy seas and drownings, of young infantrymen stepping up to assume command of leaderless units, of groups of soldiers forming ad hoc assault teams to clear pathways for men and vehicles off the beach.

All are heroic deeds.

All are deserving of remembrance.

Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944.

But, as you watch the pomp and circumstance for D-Day’s eightieth anniversary, spare a thought for the Marines of Saipan who fought a different kind of war.

A macabre war that left its own kind of battle scars.

No dignitaries fly to Saipan to commemorate that carnage.

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I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Brenda

1. W. Eugene Smith, photographer. Photo held by the National Museum of American History; not on display. https://collections.si.edu/search/detail/edanmdm:nmah_1339248