This is John Batcher, conversation with Colonel Grant Newsom, United States Marine Corps retired.

He's on Saipan following the 80th anniversary commemoration and memory of the landings on Saipan by the 2nd and 4th Marines in the 27th Army

Division in a white beach in which the Japanese, as Grant will instruct us had zeroed in the beaches. They had not

retreated to the defense in depth that would follow in Iwo Jima and

Okinawa and the land would follow in Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

And the landings were, as Grant describes them,

very rough, but then it didn't get easier

for the next 24 days, because, as Grant explains the interior was perfect for defense the

Japanese lost everybody and there were lots of suicides on the island by

civilians who thought the Americans had come to be cruel.

The Americans lost about 20% casualties.

Grand Newsom, United States Marine Corps, at the 80th anniversary, June 15th, 1944, Saipan, the beginning

of the end of the Imperial Japanese Empire. The B-29s ranged from the Northern Mariana's, Saipan is the capital,

to bomb the industrial cities of Japan and make it possible for the Emperor finally to surrender.

His Grant Neutham, more of this tonight.

Hard is how. I think anyone who survived it probably considered themselves lucky to the end of their lives.

At the time actually, inland, there was a lot of sugar cane fields and the Japanese

had time, of course, to get their defenses in place place fortunately not as well as they might have

if American ships hadn't sunk a lot of American submarines had not sunk a lot of the supply ships

that were coming into the island in the preceding months.

But the Japanese did have the beaches covered, but they also had artillery up in the hills

beyond the landing beaches, and they had excellent observation

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