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Friday July 19, 2002

Battlefields of the Pacific draw tourists, WWII veterans

JERRY GARRETT
Copley News Service

While actor Tom Hanks and other high-profile celebrities lobby for a World War II memorial in Washington, veterans of the war in the Pacific know that moving and evocative memorials already exist in the Marianas Islands.

More than 6,000 miles from the U.S. mainland, the Marianas in 1944 were the sight of fierce battles between American and Japanese troops in 1944. It's a lot less harrowing to get to them today. And many veterans, and their families, are taking advantage of a tourist-friendly economy on the islands to visit while it's still possible -- for both the aging veterans and the deteriorating sites.

Since Guam and the separate commonwealth that rules the northern islands are part of the United States, there's no need to learn a language, master strange telephone codes, or exchange money. Travelers can even use a regular 37-cent U.S. postage stamp to mail a letter home.

The Marianas, an exotically beautiful location nonetheless, are a string of islands on a north-south archipelago -- just two hours away by air from the islands of Japan. During the final stages of World War II, the Marianas formed a strategic series of stepping-stones to the Japanese mainland.

The Japanese military, of course, knew this and fought an increasingly desperate sequence of last stands, at each step along the way. Battles for the main Marianas islands of Guam, Saipan and Tinian were among the bloodiest of the war.

The main memorial to these battles, and the Pacific War as a whole, is located on Guam. It's on a high hill overlooking Asan Beach, the major site of the U.S. invasion in July 1944. From what is now the War in the Pacific National Memorial Park, Japanese commanders watched with despair as wave after wave of American "liberators" came ashore to reclaim the island it had lost in 1942.

Upon a haunting crescent-shaped wall, the names of American and local Chamorro soldiers who lost their lives in the war are inscribed. The memorial features something that the planned memorial in Washington could never offer: the actual battle site, and actual remnants of the war itself.

This is the unique aspect of the memorials in the Marianas Islands. Visitors see, as well as feel, the metallic carnage of the war. The battle sites are not "preserved" per se, but they have been left in many cases just as they were in 1944-45.

Huge coastal defense guns still loom over Guam's main harbor. The harbor itself is filled with shipwrecks -- some visible from shore, others easily accessible by a commercial submarine tour.

Saipan also offers a submarine tour of such wrecks. On Saipan, it's still possible to drive along a main road, and pass rusting, bullet- and bomb-riddled tanks, crashed fighter planes and crumbling command posts -- right along the roadside. Chilling memorials occupy the summits of Suicide Cliff and Banzai Cliff, where perhaps thousands of Japanese soldiers and civilians threw themselves to their deaths, to avoid what they expected at the hands of American conquerors.

Searchers still find live bombs, bullets, grenades, depth charges and torpedoes all around the islands -- not to mention weapons and remnants such as uniforms and bones. On tiny, unspoiled Tinian, the advancing American juggernaut built the world's largest airport in late 1944. Boasting 18 miles of doublewide paved runways, the airfield was the launching point for seemingly endless waves of bombing runs to the Japanese mainland. In August 1945, the atomic and hydrogen bombs that were dropped on Japan were loaded aboard planes that took off from Tinian. The pits, where the two massive bombs -- "Fat Boy" and "Little Man" -- were stored, are still accessible today. So are the runways, though they are rapidly being reclaimed by the vigorous tropical undergrowth. Locals will be glad to direct visitors to the sites, which are not roped or chained off, not under glass, nor behind a turnstile and ticket booth.

All these memorials are free to the public. They offer a hands-on opportunity to see and feel the relics of the war.

But time, rust and the tropical climate are conspiring to commit these artifacts to memory only. Civilization marches on; an excavation for a condo project on Saipan recently uncovered a 60-year-old cache of live bombs. A new casino on Tinian built a new international airport, on top of an old one, to accommodate gambling charters from the Chinese mainland.

The 30-mile-long island of Guam, the largest of more than 1,200 islands comprising Micronesia, is a mecca for Asian tourists. It still is home to major U.S. Air Force and Navy bases, has about 90,000 permanent residents.

Saipan, where 300,000 Japanese lived at the height of World War II, is about 120 miles north of Guam and is home to about 70,000 people. Tinian, just a couple of miles away from Saipan, has just 2,500 occupants; the U.S. military still owns more than half of the eight-mile-long island.

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