December 1st, 1945, Saipan. Three months after Japan signed the surrender documents on the deck of USS Missouri, a man walks out of the jungle. His uniform is torn, faded, but it is still a uniform. He walks straight. He holds a sword at his side. Behind him, in two columns, are dozens of soldiers, silent, dressed as well as men who have been living in caves for a year and a half can dress, standing at attention as if the inspection were scheduled and they had prepared for it.
In front of him are several hundred American servicemen. Nobody fires. His name is Captain Sakae Oba. He has been fighting on this island for 512 days. Not 512 days from the start of the battle, 512 days from the morning the battle ended. From the day American forces declared Saipan secure and began building the airfields and supply depots that turned this island into an important forward base in the Pacific.
For 512 days, while tens of thousands of American personnel lived and worked on this island, Captain Oba and his men lived in the jungle above them. The Japanese government declared him lost in September of 1944, promoting him posthumously to major. His wife, back in their hometown in Japan, became a widow in the official records. He didn’t know any of that.
He was still fighting. The story doesn’t start here. It starts on the night of July 7th, 1944, when Oba and 200 other Japanese officers stood at the front of the largest final mass charge of the entire Pacific War, more than 4,000 men behind them, every one of them knowing the sheer magnitude of what lay ahead.
Nearly all of them were right. What they found inside the American lines that night, what Oba saw and could not explain and never forgot, is the reason he is standing here now, placing his sword on the ground in front of an American officer 512 days later.
Today we tell the story of the man who survived to describe what he saw when 4,000 soldiers advanced into the American lines on Saipan. Sakae Oba was born on March 21st, 1914 in Gamagori, a small coastal town in Aichi Prefecture on the eastern shore of Mikawa Bay. His father, Eisuke, was a farmer. Oba grew up working that land. He understood early that the ground tells you things if you know how to read it. Where water runs, where the soil will hold, and where it won’t. Which hillside faces the wind and which one doesn’t. That kind of knowledge doesn’t come from books.
It comes from years of paying attention. He didn’t want to be a farmer. He graduated from the Aichi Prefectural Teacher Training School in 1933 and started teaching geography the following month. Geography, which meant he spent his days teaching young people how to look at a piece of ground and understand what it was saying. How to read a map, not as a picture, but as a set of decisions. Which route, which elevation, which approach. He was good at it. Before he enlisted, he married Mineko Hirano. That matters because of what came later. In the years between 1937 and 1944, Oba wrote more than 1,200 pages of letters and postcards to Mineko from China, from training posts, from wherever he was sent.
Their son found those letters in 2010, 66 years after the last one was written. They are not the letters of a fierce warrior. They are the letters of a man who watches things carefully and writes down what he actually sees, not what he is supposed to see, not what he has been told to expect, but what is actually in front of him. That habit, looking straight at something and recording it honestly, is the thing that will matter most when everything else on Saipan falls apart.
In 1934, at the age of 20, Oba joined the 18th Infantry Regiment garrisoned at Toyohashi. The military recognized quickly that he was not a standard soldier. He went through officer training. He was sent to China, where he saw what prolonged conflict looked like before it arrived in the Pacific. He paid attention. In early 1944, orders came through. The 18th Infantry Regiment was being transferred to the Pacific. Convoy Matsu 01 assembled in Manchuria. Four large transports, three destroyer escorts, 3,500 men heading for Guam.
February 29th, 1944. The American submarine USS Trout found the convoy about 625 nautical miles east of Formosa. Two torpedoes hit Sakito Maru, carrying Oba and his regiment, at 5:56 in the evening. The ship caught fire immediately. It took until 4:00 in the morning to completely sink. A significant number of men were lost. Soldiers, gunners, crew. They went into the water in the dark, in the middle of the ocean, 600 miles from anywhere. Colonel Momma, the regimental commander, was lost with the ship.
Oba was pulled out of the water by an escort vessel. Of the men rescued, 1,800 were brought to Saipan initially for reorganization. Most of them were then ordered onto another transport and sent on to Guam, their original destination. Oba and approximately 600 others were told to stay. Saipan needed experienced officers. Oba was given command of a 225-man medical company, tankers, engineers, and medics who had survived the Sakito Maru incident. No full equipment, no regimental commander, a unit assembled from whoever was left.
He arrived on Saipan in March of 1944, 3 months before the Americans came. 3 months to prepare for a severely mismatched encounter, alongside men who had already survived one major ordeal before the primary engagement even started. He used that time the way a geography teacher uses time. He walked the ground. He climbed Mount Tapochau, the highest point on the island—more than 1,500 ft with an unobstructed view of every beach, every road, every approach. He walked the ridgelines. He memorized which trails connected to which caves, which slopes offered cover, and which ones didn’t, which positions could hold under pressure, and which ones would collapse.
He wasn’t preparing an escape route. There was no escape route to prepare. He was doing what he always did. Reading the ground so that when the moment came, he would understand exactly what was happening and exactly what his options were. What he couldn’t read from any ridgeline was what was coming: 800 ships. The morning of June 15th, 1944, Oba stood on the high ground above the western beaches and watched it happen.
800 ships. The naval bombardment had been going on since before dawn. The kind of sustained shelling that shakes the ground continuously, as a single unbroken roar. Then the landing craft came in. Marines first. Army units behind them. Tens of thousands of men pouring onto beaches that had been prepared, fortified, and surveyed for 3 months.
Oba was a geography teacher. He had spent his professional life learning how to look at a piece of ground and understand what it was telling him. What this piece of ground was telling him was clear. This force had not come to probe the defenses and withdraw. It had come to take the island and hold it. Everything about the scale of it, the number of ships, the organization of the landing, the immediate movement inland, said the same thing. This was not going to end the way his command said it would end.
He watched what the Americans did over the next 25 days. He had been trained on a model of warfare that assumed the enemy would come at you. That the battle would be joined frontally. That courage, position, and discipline would determine who held the ground. That was the model. The Americans did not read from that model. They did not walk into fortified positions. They stood back and systematically dismantled them first. Naval guns from offshore, artillery from positions already secured, air strikes that came in low and precise. Before the infantry moved up a ridge, they opened the ridge with everything available. Before they crossed a valley, they cleared it.
The forward positions held by Japanese units were overcome not by soldiers charging into them, but by heavy fire from multiple directions before a single American boot touched that ground. Oba watched this methodical process work on position after position. It was methodical in a way he had not seen before. Not reckless, not frenzied, patient. Which is a different and more formidable thing on a battlefield. Because patience does not run out of resources or lose its resolve.
The Americans named the terrain features they fought through. Death Valley, Purple Heart Ridge. Those are not the names an army gives to places where it advances easily. They are the names of places where they paid a heavy toll and pushed through anyway. Oba’s medical company worked Death Valley. Their job was to collect the injured from forward positions and bring them back to medical care. Which was never far enough back, never fully equipped, and always one barrage from being the front line itself.
Every day his unit brought back men who were still holding on. Some made it to treatment. Some did not. Every day the perimeter shrank. The line was moving north. Every day it moved a little more north. There was a finite amount of north left. By the end of June, the surviving forces had been compressed into the northern end of the island. The sea was behind them. Two weeks earlier, the fleet that was supposed to relieve Saipan had been heavily defeated in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
The relief that was coming was no longer coming. The reinforcements were not going to arrive. General Saito knew this. His staff knew it. The question was no longer whether Saipan would fall. The question was what to do about the fact that it would.
The evening of July 6th, 1944, General Saito called his remaining officers together. He read the final order, “Gyokusai.” The literal meaning is the shattering of a jewel. The military meaning is a final, honorable stand. Not survival, not retreat, not negotiation. Complete advance. Every man who can move moving south. Every soldier instructed to fight with their utmost resolve. The wounded who could not move, also forward. The civilians who had been sheltering with military units, also forward. The order made no exceptions because it was not an order about outcomes. It was an order about the manner of ending.
Saito returned to his command post for his final moments. There was no second order, no fallback position, no plan for anyone who survived the charge. That night, sake and beer were distributed. Something to dull the part of the mind that calculates odds. Soldiers wrote letters home, final letters. There was no way to send them, but men wrote them anyway. Because the act of writing means you are still here, a person with someone waiting for them somewhere. The letters were left behind the next morning.
Oba did not know whether he would survive. No one knew. The question was how to carry out the order. And for Oba, as always, that meant understanding the ground. 200 officers were assigned to the lead rank of the charge. The men who would make first contact with the American line. Who would raise their swords and pull 4,000 men forward behind them. Before the order to advance, Oba looked at the terrain one more time. He knew where the American line was thinnest.
He knew the gap between the first and second battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment. He knew the approach angles. He knew which ground gave cover and which ground was open. What no map could tell him was what waited on the other side. At approximately 0445 on the morning of July 7th, 1944, the 200 officers in the front rank raised their swords. The words “Long live the emperor” came out of 4,000 throats at the same moment and they ran.
This was not a tactical assault. It was a wave, men running south in the dark before dawn, packed together, some with rifles, some with swords, some with bamboo spears. The severely injured who could not run had been brought forward on litters. The order had no exemptions. Every person went. Oba was in the front. He ran toward the American line knowing the severe toll the next few hours would bring. He ran knowing that was the point.
The American line gave way in the first 15 minutes. 4,000 men charging with utter determination cannot be stopped quickly by a linear defense. The wave hit multiple points simultaneously, overwhelming the forward foxholes before they could coordinate, and poured through the gaps. Oba was through the line before the sun came up and then he saw something that the last 3 months had not prepared him for.
The Americans were not retreating in a disorganized collapse. Individual positions—five men behind a truck, 10 men in a crater, a squad using a supply dump for cover—were fighting back independently, not waiting for orders from a chain of command that had just been overrun. Each position had made its own decision to hold. The wave was hitting hundreds of separate points, each one fighting independently, requiring its own effort to bypass. It was not what Oba had expected. Somewhere in that darkness, the attack ran into something formidable.
One position, one Browning machine gun, one man behind it. The gun did not stop. When the ammunition belt ran out, the man changed it and kept firing. When the angle changed, he moved the gun and kept firing. The men advancing on that position fell. The men behind them kept advancing. They fell, too. The number of casualties in front of that position grew significantly. The attack broke around that position the way water breaks around an obstacle. It went past on both sides. It kept moving south. The position did not move.
Oba did not know who was behind that gun. He did not know the man was a dentist from Milwaukee who had tried to enlist and been turned away multiple times before finally serving. He did not know the man had been serving as a battalion surgeon for exactly 10 days when the attack began, or that he was wearing a Red Cross brassard when he fired the first shot, having already defended his aid tent against multiple attackers before he walked out and found the Browning. He did not know the man would fall at that position after sustaining severe injuries with his hands still on the weapon.
Oba only saw what was left of that position when the sun came up. And what he saw there was not in any report he had ever read. By 8:00 in the morning, the charge had spent itself. American artillery had found its range. Marine reserve units moved up from the south to seal the breach. The groups of soldiers still inside the American perimeter were surrounded and overcome one by one. Over 4,000 soldiers were lost on July 7th, 1944. The largest mass charge of the war, fueled by desperate resolve, had not permanently broken the American line.
The line had bent. In places it had broken. Many were lost on both sides. But the line had held. Oba was alive. He did not know why. The ground he had moved through, the angles he had instinctively chosen, the profound luck of the battlefield. He did not examine the question. He was a geography teacher. He looked at what was in front of him and figured out what to do next. And the morning required a decision.
The guns went quiet in his sector sometime after 8:00. Oba looked around him. He was alive. 46 soldiers from his unit were also alive. Not because they had fought better, but because they were still standing when the conflict ceased. To the south, the American line was reorganizing. He could see vehicles moving, units consolidating, the steady purposeful noise of a military force reestablishing its positions. To the north, jungle. Mount Tapochau rising above everything.
Surrender was not a consideration. Not only because of pride, but because he was not ready to make that decision unilaterally for 46 men who had followed him. That was not how he understood command. Several officers around him chose differently, believing the only honorable completion of their final order was to end it themselves. Oba did not stop them. He gathered his 46 men. There were also civilians in the jungle above. Japanese settlers who had lived on Saipan before the war, families who had sought refuge in the caves rather than face the tragic events at the cliffs when the line collapsed. They had no military training, no weapons, no plan. Oba walked north.
In the days that followed, the group grew. Separated soldiers found their way to him. Civilians came in when they heard there was an organized group. By the time the numbers stabilized, Oba had more than 150 soldiers and approximately 200 civilians. Men, women, and children distributed across multiple camps on the slopes of Mount Tapochau. He organized them the way he organized everything. Separate camps for military and civilians, rotating guard assignments, patrol schedules, supply runs. The only way to feed 350 people in a jungle surrounded by an opposing garrison was to take what they had.
He knew the ground better than those searching for him. He knew which trails connected to exits, which cave systems were visible. He knew where the Americans patrolled. At night the lights of the American base filled the valley below like a small city, and from those lights, he read their organization.
On July 9th, 1944, two days after the charge, American forces declared Saipan secure. The Americans didn’t pause. The guns went quiet, and then almost immediately, the noise became construction. Bulldozers moved through the flat ground. Roads appeared, supply depots, barracks. Then the runways, long and flat, packed with compressed coral. By October 1944, the first B-29 Superfortresses landed on Saipan. Oba knew what B-29s were. He understood what those runways meant.
From Mount Tapochau, he watched the planes take off at night, heading northwest toward Japan. Hours later, some came back. His wife and son were in Gamagori. He had no radio, no way to send a message, no way to know if they were safe. He watched the planes disappear into the dark and did not know. On September 30th, 1944, the military officially declared all personnel on Saipan lost. Captain Sakae Oba was promoted posthumously to major. Back in Gamagori, his wife became a widow in the official records.
Oba was on the mountain. He heard the radio occasionally. Broadcasts described a war that did not match what he was looking at: victories, advances, firm defenses. Below him, two American runways were fully operational. Supply ships arrived regularly. He had spent his professional life teaching students to read the actual terrain. He read what was below him.
The Americans knew someone was still in the jungle. The supply caches that were raided overnight. The footprints that led into the tree line. They organized sweeps, sending out patrols to find the holdouts. None found him. There was one sweep where a Marine unit worked up the southern face of Mount Tapochau, checking the caves. They stopped to rest on a ledge 6 ft above a hidden depression in the rock. Oba and several of his men lay flat and did not breathe. The Marines rested and moved on.
The Americans gave Oba a nickname, The Fox. It was said the way soldiers talk about a resilient opponent. They had tens of thousands of personnel with full supplies and air support. He was one captain with 350 people in the jungle. He was still there. The months passed. The rainy season, the dry season. Oba kept the camp organized to keep them safe. He provided for the 200 civilians, rationing ammunition, choosing targets for night supply runs based on the best provisions with the least risk. He moved the camp when patrol patterns changed.
The war, as far as he could tell, was going badly. He did not say this to his men. November 27th, 1945. The war had been over since August. Japan had surrendered on August 15th. The formal documents had been signed on September 2nd. Oba did not know this. He had heard rumors, fragments from the radio, but rumors were not orders. He had learned not to act on things he could not verify.
That morning, the sentries heard a man walking openly through the jungle below, singing a Japanese military march. The sentries did not shoot. The man was Major General Umaji Ammo, a former commander who had been captured and sent by the Americans to find Oba. Amo understood a direct approach wouldn’t work, so he sang to identify himself. Amo laid out official papers bearing the proper seals, stating in unambiguous language that the war had ended and all personnel were ordered to lay down their arms.
Oba read every page, checking every seal. He was not going to make the final decision on anyone’s word alone. The documents were real. On December 1st, 1945, Captain Sakae Oba walked out of the jungle at the head of his command. His men looked like soldiers who had lived in caves for a year and a half, but they were in formation. They carried their weapons to be surrendered formally. Oba walked straight, holding his sword. Lieutenant Colonel Howard Kerges was waiting. Oba placed his sword on the ground. 512 days.
After the formal surrender, the American officers invited Oba to the Marine Officers Club. The men there were the ones who had searched for him, who had lost supplies to his night runs, who had rested on a ledge just above him. They shook his hand, recognizing the tremendous resilience it took to hold out for 16 months.
Back in Japan, Oba was not immediately celebrated. Some considered his refusal to follow the final order a failure to obey, despite his choice to protect 200 civilians and hold out for 512 days. The Americans in that club had a different perspective. One former Marine who had searched for Oba later interviewed him for a book. He wrote, “If Oba had been an American, he’d have been put up for a Congressional Medal of Honor.” That was a recognition of a formidable opponent.
That is what Oba saw when he led 4,000 men through the lines on Saipan. He saw a line that bent but did not break, and men who held their positions. He saw what it took to not defeat those men. And he spent 512 days watching them build on the ground where the charge had failed. He was a geography teacher who looked at what was actually there. The men who held that line are almost all gone now. Their stories go with them if no one writes them down.
