Looking back: Second World War history tour on Guam
- Tony Boccia
- Sep 13
- 4 min read
Seems crazy but nearly a year ago now we did a little Second World War history tour around Guam as a family and with the kids' friends. Here's the recap:
Our first stop was the Piti Guns Monument. It’s a short hike to the guns, three Japanese-built Vickers coastal defense pieces that never fired a shot. Two of them are in good condition, and all of them stand in almost complete silence in a dense and dark jungle. I hadn’t been here in a long time, maybe 12 or 13 years and I was surprised at how quiet it was. This is different than Asan Beach or Ga’an Point where you can smell the barbecues, hear the traffic, and see powerboats out on the water. The Piti Guns may be the best site on the island to feel the weight of the decisions taken here; despite the lack of action these guns could not have been easy to get up the ridge through a thick jungle with no roads. If there’s a better physical example of the futility of the Japanese defense of Guam, I’ve yet to see it.
After this we headed to Asan Ridge as Shoko hadn’t been there before. This is an easier walk up to the highest point on Asan Beach, where the Third Marine Division came ashore, overlooking Piti to the south and Asan to the north. From the top of the ridge you can look up to the highest points on the island, where the Asan Bay overlook and Naval Hospital are now, and just imagine how daunting it must have been for the Marines and Soldiers coming up from the Sea. You can't see Ga'an point, the Orote Peninsula is blocking it to the south and I tried to imagine how far away the U.S. Army's 77th Infantry Division must have felt to the Marines who were supposed to join them in cutting off the Japanese at Orote, with its airfield and deepwater port. We examined a Japanese fortification from the war at the bottom of the ridge close to the waterline as well.
We grabbed some well-deserved lunch at Savage Sandwich in Tumon and then headed to the South Pacific Memorial Peace Park in Yigo. This is the site of the final resistance of the battle of Guam, the area around the park is crisscrossed with tunnels and paths, some of which look to go pretty far into the hillside. Here on Guam the tunnels are unmonitored and none of them look to be well maintained so I haven’t been in them, but I imagine they look much like the ones on Okinawa or Iwo-to. Also at the park are memorials to various Japanese units such as the 18th Japanese Infantry Battalion, and a marker commemorating the Naval Air units that took part in the action around the Marianas.
The naval battles of the Philippine Sea in 1944 constituted the last of the five carrier-to-carrier battles of the Second World War (Midway, Coral Sea, Solomons, Santa Cruz), and Japan never again raised another Naval Air Force during the war, losing some 600 aircraft and three aircraft carriers off Saipan and Guam. Americans call this battle The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, but it was largely unreported in Japan. Even the Showa Emperor was not given the full account of the loss of the Marianas immediately.
Before heading out, we talked about how the Japanese knew that with the fall of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, the war was not just lost in the minds of academics but lost in the war rooms of the Admiralty and General staff. The idea behind the resistance post-Guam in the Philippines, Iwo-to, and Okinawa was to fight to the last man and try to bleed the Americans dry to convince them to come to a negotiated peace; another part of that strategy was to give the home islands enough time to stage one last stand if the Americans invaded. Children and old people were trained in hand to hand combat; my wife’s grandmother has talked about doing this as a young nurse in Tokyo.
The reality was that neither of those things happened and what occurred instead was that from airfields on Saipan and Tinian came long-range B-29 aircraft that decimated Japan’s cities in a ceaseless onslaught of air raids. The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy never came to an agreement on whose responsibility it was to defend the homeland, and so the majority of these bombing flights went unopposed; this may be one of the more sorrowful chapters in the history of this war which saw almost 900,000 killed according to some estimates. For context the atomic bombs, also launched in B-29’s from Tinian, killed 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, counting those who died between the dropping of the bombs and the end of the year.
I was quite moved by the things I saw today, so much so that I didn’t even take many pictures. Life on Guam is tough sometimes, but every now and then it’s a pleasure to find how good we really have it.
You can do your own Second World War history tour on Guam by starting here.