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A photograph of a Marine carrying a boy on his back struck Ed DesRosier when he visited the American Memorial Park on Saipan in January 2013. The enlarged photograph was captioned, “Unidentified Yank Marine cares for orphaned child.” Ed had seen small copies of this photograph many times among his father’s belongings. The Marine carrying…
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THE smell of death was everywhere as bodies littered the beaches of Saipan on June 15, 1944. Major Richard T. Spooner remembers full well the day the Americans stormed the beaches of Saipan and how they tried to pierce the Japanese staunch defense of the island-garrison. “It was a different campaign,” he said. In an…
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The Spanish-American War, which partitioned the Marianas between the United States and Germany, and World War I, which gave the Northern Mariana Islands to Japan, brought no bloodshed to the Northern Mariana Islands. World War II, however, was to devastate the islands and change the islanders’ fundamental way of life.
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World War II B-29 navigator Raymond “Hap” Halloran, who died in Menlo Park on June 7, 2011, was based at Isely Field on Saipan in 1944 and was taken prisoner of war in Japan for seven months until he was freed at the end of the war. Growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio during the Great…
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FREEDOM comes at a cost. So said U.S. Marine Corps Ret. Lt. General Lawrence Snowden in an interview with this reporter at the VFW Saipan Post in March 2012 following his trip to Iwo Jima. He said the young generation should look at Iwo Jima, Korean War, war in Afghanistan and recognize that freedom costs…