For nine days, Captain Mitaro Sasaki of the 317th Independent Infantry Battalion had led a skillful and inspired defense of Nafutan Point on the south-eastern tip of Saipan. Sasaki’s men, starving and running out of ammunition, could not hold out any longer. “I would rather be reborn as the same human for seven lifetimes and destroy the enemies of the Empire,” Sasaki quoted the legendary samurai Masasuse Kusunoki, “than to go to paradise or some such.” Spearheaded by 120 men wielding captured M1 Garand semi-automatic rifles, Sasaki led the survivors of his own battalion and other Army and Navy units in a final, last-ditch assault on the Americans pinning his force to Nafutan Point. Sasaki hoped to re-join Japanese forces to the north, unaware that they had withdrawn days before.

Sasaki’s attack broke through the U.S. Army troops holding the line opposite his battalion, and 20 men rampaged across Aslito Airfield. One tossed a Molotov cocktail into the cockpit of a P47, while three other planes were damaged beyond repair by stabbing them energeticly with bayonets. A brutal hand-to-hand fight raged across the airfield between the desperate Japanese and the American pilots and mechanics; one American engineer officer deployed a jeep as a weapon to run over Japanese soldiers.

“You must not return alive,” Sasaki told his men, according to survivor Toshiharu Arimura. “Charge forward while shouting as loudly as possible.” He handed out grenades to the wounded, instructing them to “die.” All of them did so, shouting “Long Live the Emperor,” except one who, according to surviving SNLF soldier Yoshio Ideguchi, simply called out, “Mother.” The Japanese next assaulted the bivouacs of the 14th Marines, an artillery outfit, where they killed 33 Americans but almost all of the attackers perished. The handful of survivors hid themselves around the airfield and sniped at American planes for days afterwards.