War Without Mercy? American Armed Forces and the Deaths of Civilians during the Battle for Saipan, 1944

This essay explores the U.S. military forces’ treatment of civilians in 1944 during the battle for Saipan, the first central Pacific island on which American forces encountered large numbers of civilians. Thousands of civilians, including Japanese and Korean migrants and “native” islander Chamorro and Carolinian peoples, died during the battle. The Pacific war literature overlooks the impact of the war on noncombatant island populations, preferring to focus on the actual fighting. This article extends the boundaries of the Pacific campaign’s military history to include the experience of civilians, contextualizing the debate within what John Dower has described as “war without mercy.”