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The Pacific War in Color - The Enemy Underground
Smithsonian Channel 2018



Tells the story of the Battle for Saipan in June and July of 1944. The Americans were island hopping across the pacific and had reached the Northern Marianas one of which was Saipan. These islands were strategically important because Japan tself could be bombed from the island airstrips. The battle was typically brutal with the defenders well dug in and usually fighting to the death. The US flamethrower tanks were used for the first time and after nearly a month of fighting the last few thousand Japanese soldiers committed the biggest banzai charge of the war. Over three thousand American Marines and soldiers were killed and of the 32,000 Japanese, 24,000 were killed in action and another 5,000 killed themselves.

The Smithsonian documentaries are of a high standard and apparently much of the colour film footage of the battle had not been seen before. The burnt and butchered corpses are even more horrific in colour and there's also on awful clip of a women throwing her child off a cliff. She then looks at the camera and jumps herself in order to avoid the atrocities that the Japanese had told the natives would befall them if they were captured by the Americans.

Just over a year later B-29s from the next door island of Tinian would drop the two atom bombs which brought to an end the Second World War.