The WWII Marine Who Convinced 800 Japanese to Surrender

In the summer of 1944, World War II’s Pacific campaign reached a turning point on the Japanese-occupied island of Saipan. Soldiers and civilians alike fought to the death to defend it, since U.S. victory there would crack Japan’s outer defenses and place American bombers within striking distance of Tokyo. After a last-stand suicide attack by the Japanese failed, a U.S. Marine of Mexican descent—5-foot-4 and barely out of high school—pulled off a shocking feat: He single-handedly convinced some 800 enemy combatants, instilled with the code of “death before surrender,” to emerge from hiding and give themselves up.

The audacious capture, widely considered the largest by a single soldier in U.S. history, earned 18-year-old Private Guy Gabaldon the nickname “the Pied Piper of Saipan.” He was later awarded a Navy Cross.

His feat came on July 8, 1944, one day after World War II’s largest Japanese banzai suicide attack came crashing down on U.S. forces. Banzai attacks were frantic mass infantry charges, human waves intended to overwhelm an enemy. Often used a last-ditch tactic, they usually resulted in devastating losses.

On Saipan, desperate Japanese soldiers, trapped with their backs to the sea, had charged into U.S. lines just before dawn. Savage hand-to-hand combat capped three weeks of the crucial, bloody Battle of Saipan that ultimately killed about 5,000 Americans and 23,000 Japanese troops, according to Adam Bisno of the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command. Nearly all of the 4,000-plus Japanese soldiers in the final suicide charge that day died.

Those who remained, along with hundreds of Japanese civilians, retreated to hide in the island’s jungles and caves.

The next morning, astonished U.S. Marines on patrol saw a crowd on a seaside cliff. A lone Marine stood among hundreds of Japanese soldiers and civilians, some armed. More were walking up from oceanside caves to join them. A Japanese “prisoner” waved a skivvy shirt on a stick, signaling surrender.

Gabaldon had talked them all into giving up—promising food, medical care for the wounded and good treatment by the U.S. military, while also pointing to the ominous U.S. warships just off the coast. The 18-year-old Mexican American from East Los Angeles convinced them by speaking in Japanese he had learned while living with a Japanese American foster family back home in California.

“My God, it’s over. I did it!” he recalled in his memoir Saipan: Suicide Island when the last soldiers, civilians and the wounded arrived that night where they were to be detained. “I grabbed a K-ration, devoured it, laid down on a blanket and passed out. Man, did I ever sleep what was left of that night.”

He had captured enemies before, but not at this scale. Soon after the 2nd Marine Division and U.S. Army forces landed on Saipan in mid-June 1944, Gabaldon began sneaking into enemy territory at night, mostly alone, to find caves and buildings where the Japanese were hiding.

He caught guards by surprise, shot them if necessary or forced them out with smoke bombs. If that didn’t work, he threatened those inside with flamethrowers he didn’t have. He sometimes held a guard at gunpoint while telling another in Japanese to get those inside to come out to just talk.

He had learned Japanese on the streets of East Los Angeles where he shined shoes as a street-smart kid. He moved in with two friends, first-generation Japanese American brothers, and learned the language and culture from their family. Shortly after the family was forced into a Japanese American internment camp, Gabaldon, just 17, joined the Marines. Knowing Japanese helped get him in.

The first time Gabaldon sneaked out past enemy lines, he returned with two prisoners. Threatened with court-martial and chastised for acting like a prima donna, he still went on the hunt the next night and returned with 52 more. Seeing that he was getting results, his commanding officers gave their blessing to their “lone wolf” to keep it up.

Once he started the late-night hunts, Gabaldon said, he could not let up. Taking more prisoners than any American in any war became his “driving ambition,” he wrote in his book, hoping to surpass World War I hero Alvin York, who had captured 132.

The day of the large capture in Saipan, he used what he called in his book “my spiel of East L.A. Japanese mixed with the Jap[anese] military lingo.” He captured two guards, who he compelled to return to the caves to convince others to surrender. They came back with a dozen more, all armed—at which point Gabaldon knew he was in a dicey spot.

“It was either convincing them that I was a good guy, or I would be a dead Marine within a few minutes,” he said.

He promised the desperate and wounded soldiers and civilians food, water and medical care. America’s top military brass, he told them, did not want to kill or hurt them—and would return them to Japan after the war.

He chatted to his prisoners about their families and hometowns. (His nickname among other Marines? “Gabby.”) He told them about having lived with a Japanese American family whom he loved. He shared his American cigarettes. Within an hour, 50 or so more came over the crest of the cliffs. Hundreds more followed.

After the other Marines saw the white skivvy flag, they sent reinforcements to help corral the prisoners and bring them back to base.

Japanese military espoused a strict Bushido code that made soldiers honor-bound to show unwavering loyalty to their nation and their emperor by taking their own lives rather than to surrendering to a wartime enemy. One of Japan's commanding generals on Saipan, Yoshitsugu Saitō, committed ritual suicide in a cave not long after the failed banzai attack. Many combatants threw themselves—as well as local Japanese civilians—off a steep cliff. The soldiers who gave in to Gabaldon chose to turn their back on that indoctrination.

Fearful civilians also chose surrender as an alternative to suicide, which had been ordered by the emperor. Some 22,000 non-enlisted people—Japanese, Korean and Indigenous Chamorro people from those islands—perished during the hostilities on Saipan. Gabaldon’s Spanish also came in handy given the Chamorro people’s 350-plus years of Spanish colonization.

“For the people who might have been caught in the crossfire, [Gabaldon’s bold actions] meant they survived the war,” says Bruce Gudmundsson, a military historian who teaches decision-making to U.S. Marines at Quantico. “It’s significant for them.” Gudmundsson uses Gabaldon’s military life as a teaching tool for new officers to explore how to deal with a challenging, yet talented Marine.

Gabaldon’s captures in Saipan and weeks later in the battle for the neighboring island of Tinian, the future departure point for the atomic bomb missions to Japan, are estimated to have reached between 1,300 to 1,500 soldiers and civilians. Numbers vary as the tales are told, but Gabaldon is widely considered the soldier with the most captures in U.S. military history.

With more than 40,000 people killed by bullets, murdered with swords or thrown off cliffs to their deaths in Saipan alone, Gabaldon was proud of his work as a lone wolf.

“Thank God I got 1,000 of them out alive,” he said in an interview with the University of Texas Voces Oral History Center.

When Gabaldon was awarded the Navy Cross in 1960, the Navy and Marine Corps’ second-highest honor, Secretary of the Navy William B. Franke cited his “extreme courage and initiative” in entering enemy caves, buildings and pillbox guard posts amidst hostile fire to capture “well over 1,000” troops and civilians. His exploits, the secretary wrote, contributed to America’s success and “a definite humane treatment of civilian prisoners was assured.”

Gabaldon’s military days ended when bullets hit his right arm in an ambush back on Saipan in 1945. More people heard his story on the popular TV interview show “This Is Your Life” in 1957. Three years later, his exploits on Saipan hit movie screens in Hollywood’s Hell to Eternity, an embellished script with 6-foot-tall blue-eyed Jeffrey Hunter playing the 5’4” Mexican American from East L.A.

After Gabaldon’s initial Silver Star award was upgraded to a Navy Cross in 1960, several Latino leaders, members of Congress, organizations and veterans groups campaigned for years for him to receive the Medal of Honor. It had not happened when he died of heart disease in August 2006.